Kerr Smith Stopped Reading Fan Mail After One Letter. His New Book Explains Why.

Somewhere in a stack of late ’90s fan mail is a letter from a kid who watched Jack McPhee come out to his father on that staircase, then walked into his parents’ bedroom and told them he was gay. Kerr Smith read it, felt happy and terrified at the same time, and set it down. It was the last piece of fan mail he ever read.

That detail has stayed with me since we recorded. It says more about Kerr Smith’s Dawson’s Creek years than any anniversary retrospective could. His first book, I Don’t Want To Wait, is full of moments like that, and when he came on The Gist, he walked me through the ones that shaped him, including a few he almost left out.

The coffee he thought might get him fired

Kerr Smith didn’t come to Dawson’s Creek to make history. He came to break up Dawson and Joey. Jack arrived in season two as the new guy, and in a love triangle the new guy is usually the one everyone hates and nobody keeps around.

About six episodes in, Kevin Williamson showed up on set in downtown Wilmington and asked if he wanted to grab coffee. Kerr walked in with two outcomes in his head: “I’m thinking 75%, he’s gonna want to make the character gay. 25%, this is my last day on the job.”

He’d done that math for a reason. Kevin wrote the core four as facets of himself. Joey was a piece of him. So was Jen. What none of them carried yet was his sexuality, and Jack was going to.

The plan, as Kerr remembers it, was simple and kind of brilliant: get the audience to love Jack first, then have him come out. Kerr asked for the rest of the day, called a few people he trusted, and said yes. He calls it a catalytic event, the kind of moment you can feel splitting your life into before and after while it’s still happening.

Playing Jack McPhee without the stereotype

It’s easy to forget what network TV looked like in 1998. Gay characters mostly showed up as punchlines. Kerr pointed to Doug Savant on Melrose Place as one of the only dramatic examples, and even that storyline never got real time or depth. When TV did try, it reached for the same short list of shortcuts.

Kerr wasn’t interested in any of them. He told Kevin that if he was doing this, he was going to play Jack straight, meaning he’d play him as a regular guy and let the writing carry the rest. “Playing into a stereotype to me is boring,” he told me. Wardrobe head Alonzo Wilson backed him up, so Jack kept dressing like any other kid in Capeside. The hair did change a little, which Kerr was fine with, because in his words it looked stupid before.

This is the part I think gets overlooked. Jack holds up because he was never written or played as a type. Kevin Williamson, and later Greg Berlanti when he took over the show, were telling their own coming out stories through him. Kerr gave those stories a face that didn’t wink at the audience. That’s a big reason a kid could watch the staircase scene and see himself in it.

What Kerr Smith’s Dawson’s Creek run actually cost

Here’s what most fans never saw. Kerr Smith was main cast, but when TV Guide did covers, the core four each got their own and he’d end up as an insert. The press treated him like a fifth wheel. Behind the scenes it was the opposite. The cast, the crew, and the whole town of Wilmington were family, and he says he’s been trying to recreate that on every set since.

The loneliness came from somewhere else. Nobody else on network TV was carrying what he was carrying, and he was in his late twenties, still figuring out who he was. John Wesley Shipp advised him not to go on talk shows insisting he was straight, so he didn’t. Meanwhile, for years, the first question out of almost everyone’s mouth was whether he was gay. He took roles like Carter Horton in Final Destination during hiatus partly to avoid getting typecast.

Some of it was uglier. There’s a story from Yuma, Arizona in the book that he nearly cut because he’d never really dealt with it himself. And there’s a decision from that era he says he regrets. He left that one as a cliffhanger, so you’ll have to read it.

Why this one was personal for me

I came out at 30. Long before that, I watched every episode of Dawson’s Creek with my mom, and watching how she reacted to Jack gave me a quiet preview of how she might react to me. I lost her when I was 18, and I never got to tell her. Days before she died, we watched the series finale together. If you know how that finale ends, you can imagine what that night was like.

So when Kerr’s book was announced, I reached out to his team almost immediately. I didn’t need him to say anything profound. He did anyway.

The title, he told me, isn’t really about the Paula Cole song. It’s about who he was back then, the guy who wanted the next job and the next chapter and wouldn’t wait for anything. Almost 30 years later, he’s landed somewhere else entirely: “It’s the waiting that actually matters. It’s the silence in between the moments that actually defines who you are.”

Not a tell-all

I Don’t Want To Wait isn’t a salacious memoir, and Kerr was clear that Dawson’s Creek was never that kind of show, on camera or off. It’s a book about a family that didn’t realize it was changing people’s lives while it was doing it, told by the guy who had a front row seat and carried more than most of us knew. He interviewed his castmates and crew for it, so you get their side alongside his.

The full conversation with Kerr Smith is on The Gist, wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.