In a recent interview on Refinery29, Joshua Jackson came after social media trolls he said criticized his wife, Jodie Turner-Smith, after he revealed the British-Jamaican actress rather proposed to him.
The 43-year-old actor had initially spoken about the proposal and the events leading up to it during an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Face2Face Africa reported in July. “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,” Jackson said, per Entertainment Tonight.
In the July interview with Fallon, Jackson said Turner-Smith asked for his hand in marriage on New Year’s Eve during a vacation in Nicaragua. “It was very beautiful, incredibly romantic, we were walking down the beach and she asked me to marry her,” he told Fallon.
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And when the host asked him if the Anne Boleyn actress had actually planned the proposal, Jackson said there was some sort of a “preamble.” “There was a lead-up to it,” he revealed. “I did not know [about the proposal], but she was quite adamant, and she was right. This is the best choice I ever made.”
Jackon went into further detail about what happened afterward in the Refinery29 interview, saying he actually insisted on re-proposing. “We were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic,” Jackson said.
“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 also propose].’”
Jackson said he told Turner-Smith he wanted an opportunity to seek permission for her hand in marriage from her father and her stepdad, and another opportunity to re-propose to her by doing it “the old fashioned way down on bended knee.”
“So, that’s actually how the story ended up,” he said.
Jackson also had a message for the people who came after his wife. “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.”
Joshua and Turner-Smith started dating in 2018 and ultimately got married the following year. The couple share a one-year-old daughter together. And elsewhere in the interview, Jackson opened up about how being married to a Black woman has truly “been a real education” for him “as a white man.”
“The way people get in her comments and the ignorance and ugliness that comes her way is truly shocking,” he said, ET reported. “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.”
And though the Americano actor said he admires his wife’s resilience, 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.”
He added: “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.”
