“I said, ‘Damn no! No. No. No. That’s not going to do it for me!’
Of course, from the start, it was written that Joey and Dawson were to end up together. The creator Kevin Williamson always had in mind that the young teenager embodied by Katie Holmes was going to choose the nice aspiring filmmaker played by James Van der Beek. More Joshua Jackson had something else in mind and many fans agreed with him.
In EW These days, the actor recounts how he campaigned, at the time, for Williamson to change the ending outright. Dawson and finally puts Joey with Pacey:
“I became the (fans’) advocate! I was very invested in Kevin [Williamson] and I was like, ‘Hell no! No. No. No. It’s not going to do it for me!”
Dawson: we finally know why Joey preferred Pacey
Joshua Jackson recounts today having had “a great conversation with Kevin about it. I told him that I understood his vision. That he had an idea in mind from the start… But I asked him to look at the history of the band as a whole , to make him realize that Pacey and Joey, that was the most interesting ending for these characters!”
Despite his plea, the young Joshua did not know if he had succeeded in convincing Williamson to follow this path… Until he received the final script: “Kevin was off the show and only came back to write the finale…so I knew what he was up to when he actually got the script.”
The chemistry between Holmes and Jackson had finally taken its toll. And the actor also says that his favorite episode of Dawson is “itthe one in which Katie and I are just the two of us, stuck in a Walmart, after hours. He’s really the one that sticks in my memory.”