Joshua Jackson

"Nobody liked the caesar haircut. It was such an issue this year. There were memos about it. (...) I knew it was doomed when my grandmother, who swore she would never leave Ireland again, came over for the last time, walked in the door and told me I had to change my hairstyle. Not for my own sake, but because I had 'relations' and it's embarrassing for them."

"Four years ago, I was working steadily but I felt I was disappointing my family, my friends in not living up to what they expected of me. When The Skulls came along I was drawn to it because it's a morality tale encapsulated in a thriller about a guy caught in a Faustian bargain between doing the right thing and the siren song of 'Just let go of your morality and think of all you can have.' Being Irish, I come from a Celtic tradition of storytellers and this was a story I wanted to help tell. I can honestly say I've never worked harder. But to go to bed every night saying to yourself, 'Man, I'm exhausted, but I did a great day's work' it's the best feeling you can have in this planet."

"I'm unfettered by the world, which is a very unique place to be at my age. I'll have to eventually choose what these next few years will be about, but I'm not in a rush. Besides, my personal life is much more important to me than my professional life and my self-worth isn't based on whether or not I act. I love acting, but I'm also looking into the great wide-open at this as-yet unpainted mural that will be my life. Whether or not it involves the movie business I'm not sure. I'm much more interested in becoming a good man than in becoming a good actor."

"Right now there are a lot of young actors out there. And in the next couple of years, there's inevitably going to be a thinning of the herd. I think if I improve as I go, I'll survive the slaughter."

"I hate people saying anything stupid. I don't really suffer fools very well at all. When people are acting like idiots, not that I'm not guilty of doing the odd idiotic thing myself from time to time, but when people say stupid things, it stresses me out. I have a pretty thick skin about people coming up to me and saying things to me when I'm out, I don't really mind that too much. but when people are just loud and annoying, it drives me crazy."

"I don't feel that I need to play characters who are role models for young people. If you are only good, you leave them to explore the bad on their own."

"Over 17 years I have played hockey, learned to row, I've been a dog, got blown up... It satisfies the 5 year-old intellectual curiosity, you know? Where I can do anything I want for six months and then move on."

"Whether we're socially indoctrinated to do it or whether it's some other part of the biological imperative, there is emotional attachment that grows specifically around sex. That's how personal relationships are made. If sex were only a simple function, it could be disposed of and not thought of. And you and I both know that's just not true."

"I don't consider myself pretty, I was never a pretty boy, I'm not going to be a pretty man and it's not something I truly aspire too. When I think of iconic men I think of that Forties era, of a guy in a good suit and a hat. That's when men were men."

"I was a troubled teen, as they say. I was drinking - not smoking pot so much as was the easy choice in Vancouver and I was supposed to be a rebel - but I was angry and mixed-up and there was only one parent in my family, so there were those issues that go along with abandonment and all the rest of it."

"If I'm Pacey forever, then I deserve to be Pacey forever. The onus is on the actor. I hope I will never begrudge anything about that show. It changed my life and my family's life and I would have to be a really hard-hearted bastard to look back and be angry that I did it."

"I'm really greedy, you see. I want to do everything. I just want to get better. Fame is OK, but if my picture is in a magazine and my performance is shit, then I've gone backwards."

"My mother and the mothers of my friends in single parent families were the first inspirational group of women I knew. The majority of fathers that I saw when I was growing up in Vancouver didn't take the responsibility to look after their kids and I was aware that society is geared towards punishing single women."

"When I was about 15, thinking I was engaging in a light conversation, I asked a woman when she was due. Of course, she wasn't pregnant. I learned the lesson never to ask again. As a leading man you don't ask a woman's age, and you don't care about her natural hair colour or her weight."

"There'll always be tension between male and female friends - we're animals after all, wired to accept each other on a sexual level at times. Of course we all agree to a variety of social restraints, but it doesn't mean the basic impulses aren't there, and I don't think sex is an unhealthy impulse. It's only when you try to hide it and subvert it that it manifests itself in ugly ways."

"What defies my imagination is that there would be nothing out there that would defy my imagination."

"Pick your myth - we're either Pandora or Prometheus or, frankly, maybe Icarus. We are in a tipping-point era, and we have to either catch up to our abilities, culturally, or some massive global catastrophe will befall us. The planet will live on, but we're going to make it more difficult for us to survive."