The other side of The Affair
In latest hit TV show, actor comes to terms with the emasculation of being cheated on and dumped
If you want to know who suffers the most from an extramarital affair, ask Joshua Jackson. He’s been going through it for two years now.
Not in real life, I hasten to add. Jackson has been happily partnered with Diane Kruger for the past decade.
But on The Movie Network, every Sunday at 10 p.m., Jackson goes through relationship hell on the award-winning Showtime series The Affair.
In it, he plays Cole Lockhart, the rough-edged Montauk, N.Y., townie whose wife Alison has dumped him for slick Manhattan author Noah Solloway.
“It’s really tough playing the guy who’s being cheated on,” says the engaging Jackson, still boyishly attractive at 37. “Everyone cries ‘What about the children?’ when they’re discussing a divorce, but you know what? Kids are pretty resilient.
“I was the product of a single-parent family with my mother raising two kids on her own. It wasn’t easy and I’m sure it was difficult in ways that I wasn’t party to because I was a kid at the time, but sometimes things go better for the kids when a marriage breaks up if it was an unhappy one.”
He sits on a sofa in a midtown hotel suite, sipping his Starbucks and shaking his head. “But the person who gets dumped, they’re the one with the most pain to digest.
“Look at it this way. All the things that let Cole feel masculine last year — the wife, the family, the social standing, the sense of righteousness — all of them were taken away from him. No, snatched away from him at the end of last season.”
Jackson talks about his character with the deep concern of a friend sharing news about his best bud who’s going through a really rough patch.
“You see, he’s never had to grapple with what a man really is before. He has to face his fears head on and discover who he is.”
One of the richest things about The Affair is that it doesn’t just pit two married couples against each other, but two wildly different lifestyles as well: the privileged “summerfolk” against the more down-atthe-heels yearlong residents. It’s a struggle that Chekhov knew well.
“Montauk is the last station on the train,” riffs Jackson. “Just that little bit further. Almost too far for rich people to go; that’s why they stopped at the Hamptons for years. But they needed new worlds to conquer and there we were. The barbarian invasion comes and, given the extent of the wealth they bring with them, it’s impossible to stop them.
“And what happens is that their increased capability to spend money makes it impossible to be an average working person and live there. And my wife being swept up by one of them is a direct shot across the bow of your manhood. They take the best the place has to offer, behave like parasites and you can never really compete.”
Hearing the way Jackson so totally inhabits his character, it’s easy to understand why this is the third time a hit TV series has put him on its front line with great success.
At the age of 19 in 1998, the Vancouver-born actor created the role of Pacey Witter in Dawson’s Creek, the six-season hit series that also shot Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and James Van Der Beek to stardom.
“That was a crazy time,” recalls Jackson. “And I think all the emotional rawness and difficulties I went through being 19 would have still happened to me even if I hadn’t been working on the show.
“In my memory I don’t disassociate the two emotional spaces. You couldn’t. We worked too hard. We did 24 episodes a year and, man, they were wordy episodes. That was a mental workout every day.”
What saved Jackson, he says in retrospect, was the fact that they shot most of the series in the relative seclusion of the North Carolina coast, near Wilmington.
“North Carolina was a big net positive. I don’t think I would have had the emotional tools to survive the success of that show if we had been shooting in New York or L.A. with all the vices of the industry right there at our fingertips.”
He did well enough after Dawson’s Creek ended, with lots of worthy stage and screen credits, until his next show, Fringe, came along in 2008, the sci-fi adventure series where he played FBI agent Peter Bishop from the bureau’s fictional “fringe” division.
“Working on Fringe was totally different,” he laughs. “I mean, when you’re saving the universe every week, it kinda drives you crazy. You can’t keep setting the bar this high,” and he reaches his arm far above his head.
Jackson says, “Peter changed quite drastically over the show’s five seasons and there’s nothing wrong with that. Actually, the fun of working on a TV series is that your character can change over the course of time. It’s just when it happens week to week you can go a little crazy.”
On his current job, the story was told from the viewpoint of the two adulterers during the first season of The Affair. This season, the points of view of Jackson’s Cole and his female counterpoint from the other marriage (Maura Tierney) are included as well.
Jackson relishes the complications it can cause but, as he admits with relief, “They did us a real solid by holding off on our perspectives until this year. At least we had a chance to figure out who we were, more or less.
“And there’s something really fun about laying down a character from two other people’s perspective, and then go away and come back a different person.”
That, too, brings its own complications. “There was a scene this season where I was being pushed into a sort of naked aggression against (my wife) and I fought it because I said I would never do that.”
Showrunner and series creator Sarah Treem was ready with an explanation.
“What you feel right now doesn’t matter,” she told Jackson. “You have to do what she thinks you would do, because that’s how she feels right now.”
Tricky business, but as Jackson observes with a grin, “Whoever said having an affair was easy?”