00:00Ocean's Eleven is just stressful to just not look like a dickhead in front of George Clooney.
00:04Hi, I'm Joshua Jackson, and this is my stress test.
00:16First off, the Mighty Ducks.
00:17Yeah, so God bless being young, because you don't really know that you're in way over your head
00:22while you're doing all of this stuff.
00:23But I think the most stressful stretch of this was at the end of the first movie,
00:27there's a game that requires this move called the Triple Deke.
00:31Because I was a young boy and I really loved playing hockey,
00:34I had decided that I wanted to play with all the big kids on camera,
00:38and I got my shoulders separated the week before I was supposed to do the Triple Deke.
00:43So, the stress of that was learning how to manage pain while 5,000 people are watching you,
00:50and you have to do it on camera over and over again.
00:53Lesson learned. Don't play with the big kids.
00:55I was 13 when we shot the first one.
00:58There was so much about this that was, I mean, everything about it was a learning process.
01:00I can't remember what the exact scene was, but I was in a scene with Emilio,
01:03and, you know, I just started learning how to learn lines.
01:06So, I would learn his lines, too, so I would know when to say my lines.
01:10And I guess when he was talking, I was mouthing his words.
01:14Because I didn't know any better.
01:15And after a couple takes, he's like, hey, don't do that.
01:19I talk, you talk. I talk, you talk. That's how it goes. You don't talk both sides.
01:22I wasn't on Cruel Intentions very much, but I do believe that my first day on this movie was giving a man head.
01:30And that can be stressful for a 19-year-old heterosexual boy to sit in a room and give another man a blowjob.
01:35So, my stress test on this was to commit myself to this job that I had taken on,
01:41and really make sure that I was all in, so to speak.
01:44So, then years pass, and I don't see Eric for a long time after we've had this experience together.
01:51And I'm taking out my trash one day, and he and his wife walk by, because they've just moved in down the street.
01:58She sees us see each other and have this moment of like, hey, what's up?
02:03She's like, oh, how do you guys know each other?
02:05And two of us, now well into our 30s, I think both blushed scarlet red.
02:09Like, how do you explain what that connection was?
02:13So, for Dawson's Creek, and this is something that I always try to explain to young actors,
02:19particularly when they're getting ready to start working on a television show.
02:23The thing that you don't know, that I didn't know, that is actually so difficult about that process,
02:28it's that you have to be ready to go, essentially on take one, every single day,
02:32for 14 hours a day, for 8, 9 months, in the modern era, more than 7, 8 months.
02:38And so the stress test for this was to make sure that you maintained your quality
02:43from episode 1 to episode 100.
02:46And we did that in concert with each other.
02:49I think it gets very easy to get lazy or take shortcuts,
02:53but we were all a bunch of young actors there, and we all cared about what we were doing,
02:56and we made sure that everyone consistently brought their A-game.
02:59But it is difficult to maintain that level of just mental focus,
03:04even over and above any of the emotional demands of just learning 10 pages of dialogue a day,
03:08coming back tomorrow and learning 10 pages of dialogue,
03:10the next day 10 pages of dialogue, and you've got to do it when you're sick,
03:13and you've got to do it when you're tired, and there are no days off.
03:15So that's the stress test of working on a long-running show.
03:19Karate Kid was a no-stress job.
03:20One, it's funny to be the old guy on set.
03:22This is a new world for me.
03:24I've gone from being the kid to having the kids.
03:26My job on Karate Kid was to give energy to the young actors,
03:30particularly to Ben, who is playing the new Karate Kid,
03:33and he is a lovely dude and incredibly dedicated and was working his ass off.
03:38So we trained together, and we got to know each other a little bit,
03:41but this one was a no-stress job for me.
03:43This was very easy.
03:44The affair.
03:45So sex scenes are hard, and you are in an environment that is,
03:49unless you have a very particular kink, very unsexy.
03:52And you are putting a woman's body into an uncomfortable
03:56and sometimes physically exposed place.
03:59The stress of this is always to make sure that you have open communication.
04:03So you need to make sure that you are a good partner to the woman in that scene.
04:07And so the stress test for this is because we were pushing the envelope quite often
04:10in what the power dynamics were inside of these sexual relationships,
04:14like to make sure that your partner always feels,
04:17no matter what it is that you're doing on camera,
04:19that they're safe and secure in your hands.
04:20Dr. Odyssey was stressful because of what was happening in every other aspect of my life,
04:25but I haven't got a chance to play a lot of these, like, Clooney characters yet.
04:29Yet.
04:30And it was so much fun to be working on a show where the point of the show was fun.
04:34I will say, having my house burned down in the middle of the season, not great.
04:38And trying to maintain being a dad, getting everything sorted,
04:44being a leader on set, and just remembering your words,
04:47that was quite stressful.
04:48So I think I'm a little grayer at the end of the season than I was when I started out.
04:53Dr. Death.
04:54So there is a certain amount of stress that goes into telling a true story.
04:57But for this one in specific, there was a makeup process that we used towards the end of the season.
05:02And the process itself took six hours.
05:05And then you go to work.
05:06We were the first or second show to shoot in New York post first wave of COVID.
05:11We had all these rules about isolation and separation and separate the crew out.
05:16But once you're in the prosthetic, you can't put a mask on.
05:18So there's that exposure.
05:21And then I sit there and the portion of the story that's being told is as his victims recount what he's done to them.
05:29So I would sit in this suit, in all of this weight and prosthetic,
05:33and for like another six, eight hours a day,
05:35just listen to the horrors that I had visited upon these bodies.
05:39So psychologically, that was pretty stressful.
05:43Ocean's Eleven is just stressful to just not look like a dickhead in front of George Clooney.
05:46To be invited, literally invited to the table at Ocean's Eleven as a young actor to like sit with the guys and do the thing
05:55was cool and definitely very stressful.
05:59That was my stress test.
06:01We're doing okay.
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