TThere are worse things to carry on for a few decades than the feeling of being young, successful, and surrounded by people who love you. For Kerr Smith, however, the special magic of Dawson’s Creek proved virtually impossible to replicate.
“I’ve spent the last 25 years of my career trying to recreate that experience,” Smith says of the WB teen drama, in which he played sensitive jock Jack McPhee for five seasons. “I’ve tried to live up to it throughout my career.”
Speaking on a Zoom call in October, Smith now 53, gray-haired and briskly coiffed, Smith revisits that pursuit in his new memoir, I Don’t Want to Wait: My Life on Dawson’s Creek. Part oral history, part personal account, the book draws on conversations with former castmates and colleagues, including heavy hitters like Katie Holmes, to revisit the series, the protests that followed Jack’s coming out storyline, and an episode of homophobic harassment that Smith had never discussed before. Very rhapsodic and melancholy about his experience on Dawson’s Creek, Kerr fully embraces the nostalgia of his memoir.
When Smith arrived on the set of Dawson’s Creek in 1998, he had only a handful of acting credits under his belt, including a small role in an episode of Baywatch. and an uncredited role in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Introduced in season two as a sexy interloper meant to stir up trouble between Dawson Leery (the late James Van Der Beek) and Joey Potter (Katie Holmes), he was getting his feet wet on the set in Wilmington, North Carolina, with no reason to think the arrangement would change.
Then, about eight episodes into her series, creator Kevin Williamson asked her out for coffee. Smith remembers the invitation as ominous. “I’ve been on the job for about two months,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit. Am I getting fired?'”
As he walked towards the café, he began to suspect otherwise. Smith had thought about how the show’s characters reflected different parts of Williamson himself: Joey represented one side of the writer, Joshua Jackson’s prankster Pacey, Dawson the smarter one, and Michelle Williams’ Jen his wild side. But no one represented Williamson’s sexuality. Always secretive, the creator, Smith suspected, wanted to tell a story that would allow him to reach out in some form beyond his family and friends.
At the cafe, Williamson confirmed his suspicions. “His exact words were, ‘Kerr, we want to go a different route with Jack.'” Smith’s immediate reaction was “holy shit,” although he kept that part to himself. He asked Williamson for a day or two to consult with people whose opinions he respected. In 1998, playing a gay character in a hit teen drama series seemed like a very high-stakes proposition.
The move made Jack the center of the show’s groundbreaking gay coming-of-age story. It also made Smith half of what became the first kiss between two men on prime-time television in the United States, when Jack made out with college prep student Ethan (Adam Kaufman) outside his dorm room in the third season finale.
“I was so nervous for that kiss,” Smith says of filming the scene with Kaufman. “We did ten takes of it. Ethan was nervous too, no matter what he says now.”
One director gave actors simple advice: it doesn’t matter whether the couple is two men, two women, or a man and a woman. If the characters were attracted to each other and loved each other, they should just kiss.
“He was right,” Smith said. “I thought about it and thought, ‘Yeah, it really is that simple.’”
“There was a whole generation where this was a pivotal storyline for them and that was after they had their own coming out experience,” showrunner Greg Berlanti said in a 2020 interview. “It was nice to think that somehow we had sent a safety line to young people in a way that maybe wasn’t there for us. It’s easy to forget how valuable that is.”
Back then, not everyone was so accepting. Dawson’s Creek faced protests outside its Wilmington studio, and Smith remembers walking through crowds of protesters to get to work. He was frightened, but he found some comfort in the fact that the protesters seemed to direct their anger at the scenario rather than at him personally.
“I didn’t agree with the protests, but I respected the fact that they weren’t actually going after Kerr Smith, which was good,” he said.
He was trying to keep his attention on work. “I put the blinders on,” he remembers. But the hostility was not always limited to the studio doors. While filming the horror film The Forsaken in Yuma, Arizona, around 2001, Smith returned to his car and found it covered in red graffiti, including homophobic slurs. He never found out who did it or how they identified his vehicle.
For years he kept the incident to himself. Talking about it in his memoirs was the first time he put it on paper.
“I had never told anyone about it until I decided to put it down on the page,” he says. “As an actor, I like to be very vulnerable. But as a writer, when you’re writing about your own experiences, it’s different, because it’s you. It’s actually you.”
The experience of writing this book also involved comparing his memories with those of his former colleagues. He came away with a realization: “One of the things I learned is that no two people remember the same event in the same way. »
During the show’s summer hiatuses, Smith deliberately sought out roles that would put some distance between him and Jack (in other words, aggressively heterosexual). One of them was Final Destination, in which he played Carter Horton, a high school bully whose personality could hardly have been further from Jack’s. Carter, Smith said, was “a complete asshole.”
Since then, he’s lived a more subdued life, posting love-laugh live messages on Instagram and starring in a handful of films and TV shows (including a brief stint on Riverdale, where he played, surprisingly, the principal of a school named Stonewall Prep). But Jack’s story followed him anyway. Smith was finishing his memoir when Van Der Beek died in February from colorectal cancer. Having previously written about the cast’s September 2025 reunion at New York’s Richard Rodgers Theater, a charity event supporting F Cancer, Smith added a final chapter inviting cast, crew members and friends to contribute short memories of Van Der Beek. “I didn’t speak with the cast again after he died,” Smith said. He hopes Van Der Beek would have approved this addition.
More than 25 years later, viewer response has remained overwhelmingly positive, with a new generation of fans attracted to the series after its Netflix debut in 2020. People still approach Smith to tell him what Jack meant to them.
“The number of people where this happens versus the negative things that happen is, no joke, a million to one,” he says with a proud smile. “People come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Jack, the story changed my life. » People have even said to me, “I don’t know if I would be here today without Dawson’s Creek.” »
Gn entert
