James Van Der Beek and Joshua Jackson Barely Spoke on Dawson’s Creek Amid Katie Holmes Love Triangle, Kerr Smith Reveals

Okay, so. Some TV love triangles stay on the screen. This one? It followed everyone home.

It’s been almost thirty years since Dawson’s Creek first showed up on The WB, and one of its stars has finally decided to talk about what was actually happening behind the scenes during that first season. Turns out the show’s big love triangle wasn’t only a storyline. It was, more or less, real life too.

Kerr Smith — Jack McPhee, if you watched the show — put out a memoir this week. It’s called I Don’t Want to Wait: My Life on Dawson’s Creek, and it landed on Tuesday, November 10. He doesn’t bury the lead. Right there in the book, he gets into the off-camera tension between James Van Der Beek and Joshua Jackson, with Katie Holmes caught in the middle of it.

Smith calls it the show’s “worst-kept secret,” which is a funny way of putting it, because it also sounds like something absolutely nobody was saying out loud at the time.

“The worst-kept secret at Dawson’s Creek was season one’s rather meta ‘love triangle’ between James, Josh, and a certain Joey Potter look-alike,” Smith wrote, in excerpts shared with Entertainment Weekly. “And hey, Katie and the guys were all in and around their twenties, and undeniably attractive.”

Yeah. No kidding. Stick three ridiculously good-looking twenty-somethings on a set in Wilmington, North Carolina, hand them scripts about a love triangle, and see what happens. Smith is quick to point out that nobody was doing anything scandalous. “Was that scandalous? Hardly. Unpredictable? Not even close,” he wrote. But — and this is the part that sticks — he says the whole thing hung over the set anyway.

“While nobody was talking openly about the romantic entanglements that had quietly complicated season one, those simmering tensions had a way of making the on-set air feel slightly charged, even on the most ordinary days, into season two and beyond.”

Slightly charged. On the most ordinary days. For years. That sounds exhausting, honestly.

They Played Best Friends. Off Camera, Barely a Word.

Here’s the bit that’ll sting if you grew up on this show. Dawson and Pacey — the creek-side heart-to-hearts, the loyalty, the whole best-friends-since-childhood thing — and according to Smith, the two actors playing them barely spoke when the cameras weren’t rolling.

Smith joined the cast in season two. By then, he says, Van Der Beek and Jackson were “professional” with each other. Professional. You know what that word means when someone uses it like that. It means polite. It means correct. It means nothing extra.

“I can’t recall a single conversation between them,” he wrote. “They didn’t interact off set. It wasn’t dramatic, and it didn’t get in the way of anything that mattered. It was simply… a thing that existed.”

A thing that existed. God. There’s something so bleak about that phrasing, and so honest too. Not a feud, not a shouting match — just two guys who played best mates on TV and couldn’t find a single thing to say to each other in real life. For anyone who spent years rooting for Dawson and Pacey’s friendship, that’s a weird one to sit with.

And it wasn’t some secret only Smith noticed. The whole cast knew. Mary-Margaret Humes, who played Dawson’s mum Gail Leery, told Smith as much when he spoke to her about it twenty-five years later. “Everyone was aware of it,” she said. “It was a bit uncomfortable to be around… and also sad to watch.”

Sad to watch. That’s the line that gets me. Not awkward. Not weird. Sad.

Enter the Mama Bear

Every set needs someone who’ll actually do something about the weirdness instead of just quietly enduring it. On Dawson’s Creek, that person was Humes. Smith calls her the show’s “mama bear,” and after you hear what she did, you’ll get why.

So the story goes like this. Jackson’s 2000 thriller The Skulls is coming out, and he invites the cast to a screening. Van Der Beek tells Humes he won’t be going. And Humes — who, remember, played his on-screen mother — basically goes, no, you’re coming, I’m picking you up, be ready. “Period.” Her words, apparently. No discussion.

She also had a word with Van Der Beek directly and asked him to patch things up with Jackson. And then, at the screening, something actually shifted. Smith’s version of it:

“Josh made his way over, hugged her, and thanked James for coming,” he wrote. “For the first time in ages, their eyes met, even when the cameras were off. It felt like, she says, ‘the beginning of the healing process for them.'”

A hug. A thank-you. Two people finally looking each other in the eye. Small stuff, right? Except after years of nothing, small stuff is everything. Humes, Smith told Entertainment Weekly, was “amazing” on set — always taking pictures of everyone, putting together behind-the-scenes videos every year. She was the glue. She and Jackson actually reunited at a Heroes Gala just last month, which says a lot about how real those bonds stayed once the show was long over.

When the Show Basically Wrote Itself

Part of why this story hits so hard is how neatly it lines up with the show. I mean, come on. Dawson’s Creek — created by Kevin Williamson, premiered January 1998 — was literally built on this exact setup. Dawson Leery and Pacey Witter, best friends since they were kids, both in love with Joey Potter. The triangle powered the show for six seasons. Breakups, betrayals, big speeches on docks, all of it. And one of the most argued-about finales in teen drama history.

Finding out the actors were living some version of that tension off camera doesn’t wreck the show. If anything it explains it. Those scenes had a charge to them, and now we know why. Real, unresolved feeling has a way of leaking through, even when everyone’s being “professional” about it.

Smith’s own spot in all this is interesting too. He walked in during season two, playing Jack McPhee — one of the first openly gay teen characters to be a regular on network TV, which was a genuinely big deal at the time. He arrived a year into the show’s history, already complicated, and watched it all from the edge of the room. Maybe that’s why his account reads so clear. He wasn’t picking a side. He was just paying attention.

So Where Are They All Now?

Time did what time does. Jackson and Holmes have actually reunited on screen for a new movie — their first project together since the Creek days — which tells you the late-nineties awkwardness is well and truly in the past. Jackson’s built a serious, all-over-the-place career since then: Fringe, The Affair, Doctor Odyssey. Holmes has bounced between acting and directing, doing things very much her own way.

Van Der Beek has stayed close to the Creek family in public, turning up for reunions and anniversary bits with the same warmth people remember from the show. The cast has gotten together over the years, and the photos from those reunions tell their own story. People who grew up together — in public, under insane pressure — and still actually like each other.

And that’s kind of the point of Smith’s book, I think. It’s not a hit job. It’s not some scandal exposé. It’s a look back at a bunch of young actors who got famous before they’d really figured out who they were, trying to handle fame and feelings and a hit TV show all at once. Of course it got messy. How could it not?

Why We’re Still Talking About This Show

Look, Dawson’s Creek just won’t go away. New audiences keep finding it on streaming. The finale is still getting argued about online. Every few months, some new story from the set pops up and the internet loses its mind all over again. There’s a reason.

The show landed at exactly the right moment. Late nineties. Teen dramas growing up. Characters who talked like they’d read too many books and felt everything too much. It shaped how a whole generation thought about young love and friendship, for better or worse.

Smith’s memoir just adds a small, human piece to that picture. Not a scandal. Not a feud. Just three young people, a weird atmosphere, and a cast mum who eventually got fed up and drove one of them to a movie screening to sort it out. It’s funny and a bit sad and honestly pretty relatable. Who hasn’t worked somewhere with a tension that needed a Mary-Margaret Humes to step in and fix it?

Maybe that’s the real takeaway. The best Dawson’s Creek stories were never really the ones on screen. They were the ones between takes — the silences, the hug, the slow thaw. Those are the ones still worth telling, nearly thirty years later. And thanks to Kerr Smith, we’re finally hearing them.

Source: Just Jared