Kerr Smith Opens Up About His Car Being Vandalized Over His Groundbreaking 'Dawson's Creek' Role
Kerr Smith has recently shared an incident where his car was vandalized just because of his unconventional character on Dawson’s Creek. Stepping into a groundbreaking television role is always a bold career move, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, pioneering marginalized community representation on network television often came with a heavy personal price.
Looking back at his iconic run as Jack McPhee on the beloved WB hit show, actor Kerr Smith is pulling back the curtain on the ugly vitriol and hostility he faced behind the scenes.
Kerr Smith gets candid about an unfortunate chapter of his life
Reflecting on his tenure on the iconic WB teen drama Dawson's Creek, actor Kerr Smith is opening up about the darker realities and vitriolic backlash he encountered while portraying the groundbreaking character Jack McPhee. In his newly released memoir, I Don't Wanna Wait: My Life on Dawson's Creek, the 54-year-old actor details the heavy personal toll of playing television's first recurring g** teen - a role that left an indelible mark on pop culture but also subjected him to open hostility.
According to PEOPLE, while on location in Yuma, Arizona, in 2001 to film the horror flick The Forsaken, Smith faced a jarring act of targeted vandalism. After stepping out of a local casino where he had been unwinding with a game of Texas Hold'em on his day off, he discovered his black Ford Focus - a promotional vehicle gifted to him during his rising-star era - completely defaced with vile, homophobic graffiti.
“My car was completely graffitied in anything you can imagine in terms of homosexuality,” Smith told the outlet.
Describing the vehicle to PEOPLE as essentially “destroyed,” the actor recalled relying on the studio's transportation crew to help scrub away the hateful rhetoric, noting that navigating such intense societal hostility behind the scenes was uniquely difficult during that era of television history.
The turbulence surrounding the character's pioneering narrative in the show, which also starred the late James van der Beek, was not just restricted to isolated acts of vandalism.
Backlash to Jack's coming-out plot
The actor recalled navigating a daily gauntlet of ideological opposition just to arrive at work, routinely inching his vehicle through agitated crowds of protestors stationed outside the North Carolina production facility. Reflecting on his involvement in the milestone television arc, which creator Kevin Williamson mapped out for him before cameras rolled, Kerr Smith acknowledged that weathering the storm was ultimately a small price to pay.
Decades later, the residual weight of that hostility has been entirely eclipsed by profound validation, with the star noting that everyday fans still approach him to share how deeply the groundbreaking representation altered the trajectory of their lives. I Don't Want to Wait: My Life on Dawson's Creek, his book, will be published in the US and Australia on November 10 and in the UK on November 26.
What are your thoughts on the various difficulties Kerr Smith faced just because of his character on Dawson’s Creek? Do let us know.
Edited By: Hriddhi Maitra
