In his 15 years as a working actor, there s only one film Joshua Jackson has done that made people stop him in the street to say more than just, Hey! You re the guy in that movie.
After I did The Laramie Project, about the homophobe-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, people would stop me in the street and say, Hey!
Thank you for making that movie, says the 28-year-old Canadian-born actor. I have a feeling that people are going to react to Bobby in the same way.
Well on his way to being remembered for more than just being the dude from Dawson s Creek, Jackson is particularly proud to be a part of Bobby, a film written and directed by Emilio Estevez and set in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day Robert F.
Kennedy was shot there.
Bobby stars a virtual orchestra of big-name actors and entertainers, including Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, William H. Macy, Lindsay Lohan and Ashton Kutcher.
Besides feeling as if he just finished playing in his first All-Star game, Jackson says he hopes his role, as one of Bobby Kennedy s idealistic campaign managers, will inspire people to put on their political boxing gloves.
To tell you the truth, I hope this movie pisses people off, says Jackson, who, along with the rest of the cast, took the Bobby job for personal and political reasons. This movie couldn t be coming out at a better time for America because, unfortunately, there are too many parallels between 1968 and 2006.
Pick your hot-button topic war overseas, massive social inequality, deepening of racial and economic divides, social robber barons.
Weaving in emotional and sometimes eerie footage of the real Kennedy making his way to his final campaign stop, where a cast of fictional characters will unknowingly wash away their sometimes trivial problems with the blood of a Democratic hero, Bobby makes no bones about its political agenda.
If this movie does what it has the potential to do, it will spark new and old ideas, says Jackson, who for part of his childhood grew up in Seattle and California and now has dual U.
S.-Canada citizenship. For an older generation, it should remind them of a more idealistic time in their lives when they didn t think twice about standing up for what they believed in.
For my generation, it s a reminder that this is our country. We own it. We get to tell politicians how we want it to be run.
Bobby Kennedy understood that.
Jackson says that the cast and crew knew that they were telling one of America s most important stories one that had touched many of their lives.
Between shoots, there was a lot of preaching to the choir about how much people were angered and affected by RFK s death.
A cameraman talked about the Superman pajamas he was wearing when he found out about the assassination, and Sheen shared the story of how he moved his family (including son Estevez, then 6) from New York to Los Angeles in 1968 to have a better understanding of what was happening to the country.
He believes the closest his generation has come to feeling an emptiness like the one left by Kennedy s assassination was after grunge rocker Kurt Cobain s suicide in 1994.
In an earlier age, it was John Lennon s murder in 1980; in the 60s, John F.
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with RFK.
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