Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson Call It Quits: A Look Back at Their Relationship

After nearly four years of marriage, Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson have officially called it quits on their relationship. On Oct. 2, Jodie filed for divorce from the 45-year-old actor, citing “irreconcilable differences,” ET has confirmed.

In court docs filed by celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser in Los Angeles, the date of the former couple’s separation is listed as Sept. 13. Jodie is seeking joint custody of their 3-year-old daughter, Juno Rose Diana Jackson, and asking that no spousal support be awarded to either party. She is also requesting that attorney’s fees and costs be paid by Joshua.

Although Jodie and Joshua’s romance began under the radar, their saucy one-night stand turned drool-worthy marriage quickly made them certified #CoupleGoals to fans. The estranged couple met in 2018 and, according to the 37-year-old actress, neither party expected their relationship to last as long as it did.  

The actress stopped by Late Night With Seth Meyers in May 2021, where she revealed that the pair had a one-night stand that evolved into a “three-year one-night stand.”

Jodie explained that they met at a party where she played hard to get. “First of all, I saw him before he saw me and when I saw him, I was like, ‘I want that,'” she said. “And then when he saw me, I just pretended like I didn’t see him. He had to yell across the room to me, and I was wearing this T-shirt from a movie called Sorry to Bother You and [actress] Tessa Thompson plays a character called Detroit, and she has this T-shirt that says, ‘The Future Is Female Ejaculation.'”

“And so, he shouts across the room, ‘Detroit!’ He comes over and… does this really cute, charming thing that he does and just all night — he just basically followed me around the party,” she added.

In an interview with Insider, Joshua clarified that it was “technically a three-night stand.” 

“It was sealed with a kiss that night and then we didn’t leave each other’s sides for, well, three years now,” the 44-year-old actor added. 

Although the duo was seen in public several times in 2018, they finally made their red carpet debut as a couple while attending the Queen & Slim premiere at 2019’s AFI Fest at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. And although they looked stunning together, people couldn’t help but notice that they were both wearing rings on that finger, sparking marriage rumors.

The couple officially married in December 2019, several months after they obtained a marriage license on Aug. 18 of that year, and were spotted leaving a courthouse together in Beverly Hills, California.

The duo kept mum about their wedding, but Jodie shared a sweet photo of her and Joshua just a few days after reportedly getting their license, writing, “Two people who only fancy each other a little bit.” 

Unsurprisingly, the story of them saying their I do’s is just as titillating as the beginning of their relationship.

The Dawson’s Creek actor appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in July 2021, where he shared some details about how the two decided to get married. 

When host Fallon asked when Joshua knew Jodie was the one, he jokingly replied, “I knew the moment she asked me.” 

He went on to say, “She asked me on New Year’s Eve. We were in Nicaragua. It was very beautiful, incredibly romantic, we were walking down the beach and she asked me to marry her.” 

Joshua noted that his future wife was steadfast in her proposal, saying, “I did not know [she would propose], but she was quite adamant and she was right. This is the best choice I ever made.”

Instead of people taking the story as the sweet callback it was meant to be, folks reacted very negatively to the idea of Jodie proposing to her husband. The backlash resulted in Joshua stepping up to defend his wife and letting everyone know that he won’t stand for any slander toward his partner.

In an interview with Refinery29, the actor called out people who left negative comments on his wife’s Instagram account after learning that she was the one who proposed to him.

“I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn’t give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist,” Joshua said, sharing that he later proposed to the Anne Boleyn star too.

“We were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic,” he recalled. “And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn’t say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I’m still old school enough that I said, ‘This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too].'”

“She has a biological father and a stepdad, who’s the man who raised her. [I said], ‘You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.’ And then, ‘I would like the opportunity to re-propose to you and do it the old fashioned way down on bended knee,'” he continued. “So, that’s actually how the story ended up.”

Though he did eventually pop the question to his wife, Joshua was quick to criticize anyone who had a problem with Jodie’s proposal to him.

“For anybody who is freaked out by a woman claiming her own space, shut the f**k up,” he said. “Good God, you cannot believe the things people were leaving my wife on Instagram. She did it. I said ‘yes.’ We’re happy. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.”

The Dr. Death actor admitted to Refinery29 that being married to a Black woman “has been a real education for me as a white man, truly.”

“The way people get in her comments and the ignorance and ugliness that comes her way is truly shocking,” he said. “And it has been a necessary, but an unpleasant education in just the way people relate to Black bodies in general, but Black female bodies in specific. It is not OK. We have a long way to go.”

While Joshua is proud of how Jodie handles the negativity, he said, “I would wish for my wife that she would not have to rise above with such amazing strength and grace, above the ugliness that people throw at her on a day to day.”

“I am impressed with her that she does it, but I would wish that that would not be the armor that she has to put on every morning to just navigate being alive,” he added.

Some might say their marriage was fate, considering in January 2020, the British actress named her husband’s character on Dawson’s Creek when asked by W magazine who her first crush was.

“It was Pacey from Dawson’s Creek!” she responded. “I was a very young teenager.”

And Jodie has let her #TeamPacey flag fly very brightly on social media. Not only does she have shirts with her husband’s face on them, but she never fails to share a moment that proves Pacey Fever has never died down. 

A month after the W magazine interview, Jodie posted a video to her Instagram Stories that showed the couple browsing Home Depot as the store began playing the teen drama’s catchy theme song (“I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula Cole). Jodie began singing along as her husband jokingly pulled a face beside her.

“You couldn’t write this,” she captioned it. “Felt ALL THE FEELS when I heard this song. #PACEY4EVA.”

“We’re in home depot and they just started playing paula cole ‘i don’t want to wait’ and you KNOW I had to serenade @VancityJax!!!!!” she added on Twitter.

Hilariously, Joshua told ET in 2015 that he hopes Dawson’s Creek reruns go off the air by the time he has kids.

“I have noticed friends of mine’s children, like teen and preteen children, suddenly being like, ‘Oh! You’re an actor! That’s what you do for a living!’ Yeah, it lives forever,” the actor said of the iconic series. “I’m glad all my awkward teen years are preserved for all time.”

“I hope by the time I have children who are of the age that they can watch it, that that show is off the air,” he continued. “It’s going to be very hard to have any authority in my own household if that’s on the air.”

Unfortunately for Joshua, it’s unlikely that his daughter won’t have access to the series since it’s available on multiple streaming platforms. 

The couple welcomed their daughter, Juno, in April 2020. Although Jodie never officially announced her pregnancy, she let her baby bump do the talking on social media.

On Valentine’s Day, she shared a sweet video of Joshua rubbing her baby bump and referred to him as her “baby daddy.”

“Our 2nd valentine’s day and it’s even more magical than the first!” she wrote. “Here’s to a lifetime of them. Happy valentine’s day to the man who sees my soul and holds my heart. Love you, baby daddy.”

Jodie also replied to a fan on Twitter who asked her how she knew she was ready for a child with another sweet message about Joshua. 

“I don’t think you’re ever ‘ready’… but there were definitely certain boxes I wanted to tick before committing to it,” she tweeted. “The most important for me: being w/ sum1 I knew would be a great life partner. Life has many variables, but once I knew I’d met the right person, I felt unafraid.”

For Jodie’s first Mother’s Day, the Little Fires Everywhere star took to Instagram to pen a beautiful tribute to his longtime love.

“Dear Jodie, On this most special of mothers days I want to thank you for the being the light that you are,” he wrote. “For the the passion with which you threw yourself into nurturing and protecting our child when she was in your womb. For the dedication and will you showed bringing her into the world. I have never witnessed a more powerful being than you through those moments.”

“Thank you for the depth of grace you have found since our daughter has arrived. The commitment that you make look so effortless but I know is anything but,” he continued. “Thank you for making me a father. For trusting me enough to embark on this journey together. I am humbled more and more every day by that. I love you. I love seeing you enter the pantheon of mothers. And I look forward to walking this path by your side as we nurture this little engine of joy you have blessed the world with.”

In return, the Queen & Slim star wrote a short and sweet belated first Father’s Day tribute for her husband.

“Big soulmate energy. #1 daddy. Just checking in to say that us girls are so lucky to have ya,” Jodie captioned an Instagram photo of Joshua sitting on the edge of a bed looking up at the camera as sunlight came in from a nearby window. 

The actress also posted a few more photos of the new dad to Twitter, proudly writing: “Many have called him daddy. I made him one.”

Jodie has been very transparent about the hardship she faced during her pregnancy and how having her husband by her side served as a balm for her fears.

The actress was in her second trimester of pregnancy while filming the Amazon Original Movie, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, with Michael B. Jordan. The strain of the action film made her concerned about the impact it was having on her unborn child. 

“It was full on,” she told Cosmopolitan UK of filming. “I didn’t know at the time exactly how I would feel in my body at that stage. My lack of knowledge about the changes your body goes through… That all made it very challenging when you’re being very physical while growing a life inside of you.”

“My husband was there for much of the time I was filming. I had a lot of hot baths,” she said of decompressing. “We rented an ultrasound machine and I would look at the baby almost every night. Because of how active I was doing an action film, I didn’t feel any movement until I was about 22 weeks [pregnant] so I spent a lot of time during my pregnancy really scared. So I needed to look at her to know everything was OK.”

Jodie had to deal with all the typical physical struggles of growing a human being in addition to the demands of an action film. 

“Everything is different — how you breathe, the temperature your body runs at. It’s a massive thing you’re undertaking already, so to add on top of that an extremely physical [acting] role. It was super challenging — I learned a lot about myself through that,” she shared.

When it comes to their daughter, Jodie revealed in an interview for AnOther Magazine that, although she loves her life, she finds fame “unnerving,” especially because she attributes “a lot” of that fame to her husband’s popularity, and thus wants to protect her daughter “for as long as I can.”

“I love my life and I’m so grateful for all of the bounties that it provides. It definitely is a little bit unnerving, fame, especially because a lot of my fame comes from the fact that my husband’s been famous for a long time and I’m a Black woman married to him. As I said, political body,” she explained. “That is a story for people. And that is not what my daughter chose. I want to protect her from that for as long as I can and not let the more negative elements of that affect her. I just want her to feel like a grounded human being, as grounded as one can be when you grow up wealthy… And her father treats her like she is a goddess walking on Earth.”

Joshua echoed his wife’s sentiments when ET caught up with him during a press junket for his show, Dr. Death. The actor opened up about how his life has changed “in every single possible way” since tying the knot and becoming a father within the past year.

“There is nothing that is not better off then being married to her and having that baby. It’s everything,” the actor told ET. “I wanted to say congratulations to her. [Jodie] is in Cannes right now for the first time with her movie… I wish I could be with you there, love.”

ET spoke with the actor again at the 27th annual Critics Choice Awards, where he shared that their daughter wanted to join her famous parents at the event.

“Oh yeah, she’s talking! So when we were leaving to come down here today, she was like, ‘I come work? I come too? I come too,'” Joshua said of their daughter.

The actor, who was nominated for his work on Dr. Death, added that the couple’s daughter has dreams beyond Hollywood. “[Being an] actress is gonna be too small for her,” Joshua added. “She’s gonna rule the world.”

While the couple never discussed if they wanted more children, their passion for each other wasn’t pushed to the back burner after becoming parents.

March 2022, Jodie shared a series of photos on Instagram from her and her husband’s date night at the 27th annual Critics Choice Awards. The photo carousel led with a picture of Jodie, wearing nothing but a headband, and posing on a balcony while Joshua — who is fully dressed in a tux — stands behind her and covers her butt with his hand.  

The next photo shows the After Yang actress standing on the same balcony, sans her husband and clothes, with her back turned to the camera. Joshua makes another appearance as he leans in for a kiss from his wife, who sticks her tongue out.  

In the remaining pictures, Jodie documents the journey to her full look from the night with pictures of her bedazzled nails, her extensive jewelry on her fingers and her stylist helping her get into the Gucci dress she wore for the evening.  

“The cat that got the cream,” she captioned the photo.

“You’re talking about me right? I’m the cat that got the cream…because…wow,” her husband responded in the comments. 

When she covered Elle UK‘s May issue the following year, Jodie opened up about her initial “resistance” to becoming a mother and how she feels now that her daughter is here.

“It’s interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother and, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world,” she said.

“Then I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. I did have this mini pause, where I was like, ‘She’s going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I’d always felt a little bit tormented by,'” Jodie continued. “Now that I’ve got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons. I’ve been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism.”

As for how she feels about Juno, Jodie gushed, “I love this little girl so much.”

“She’s so funny,” Jodie praised. “It’s a big job to prepare children for the world. The best thing that we can do is let them touch the earth and be grounded and real — as real as one can be when you have the level of privilege that obviously my child has. I’m not acting like she’s not a nepo baby. But I worked damn hard to have a nepo baby!”

In a May interview with The Times, the Fatal Attraction star shared that it was meeting Jodie that changed his mind about getting married and having children.

“Partially, it’s age,” Joshua told the British publication. “I’m old enough to be able to do this. Partially it’s about finding somebody in the right moment of life. If we had met five years earlier we probably would have had a torrid affair, but all the rest of this stuff, I was just not ready. I didn’t think I ever wanted to get married.”

Joshua recalled meeting Jodie through a mutual friend at a 2018 charity event in Los Angeles. Joshua said he and Jodie would “spend every moment together and find reasons to be in other cities together at the same time.”

He also opened up about Jodie proposing to him during a New Year’s Eve vacation to Nicaragua, explaining that although he didn’t know if she had planned to ask beforehand, “the organic and instinctive answer was yes.”

“Six months [after the proposal], she was pregnant and we were on our way. And now we have this beautiful baby who is literally the manifestation of that love,” Joshua continued of the pair’s daughter. “It is impossible for me to look into the face of my child without feeling love for my wife.”

He added of becoming a father, “It has changed me in every single possible way.”

This was the first marriage for both actors.

Watch the video below for more on Jodie and Joshua.

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