Ask for a male actor with great style, and the names Pitt, Clooney and Depp are often mentioned. Of the younger turks, add Gosling and Garfield. But what about Jackson? As in Joshua.
Sound like a stretch? Well, consider his bona fides: He has attended the Met Gala four of the last five years, and was a presenter at the most recent Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. He also lives part of the year in Paris, where he is a neighbor of Karl Lagerfeld.
Indeed, the 37-year-old actor, a star on “The Affair” on Showtime (its second season starts Sunday) who first achieved fame on the late-’90s teenage drama “Dawson’s Creek” and later the sci-fi series “Fringe,” has quietly become a fashion guy. No one is more surprised by this than him.
“Trust me, never in my life did I think I’d be carrying my groceries home and have a stop-and-chat with Karl Lagerfeld,” Mr. Jackson said the other day in the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan, where he was staying while filming the show.
Mr. Jackson’s entree to the fashion world came through his longtime partner, the German actress and model Diane Kruger. Before they met, he said, he was a T-shirt and jeans guy, a style underachiever, something he internalized growing up in a working- and middle-class environment in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“There’s a certain degree to which you don’t want to dress or be caught dressing because you’re going above your station,” Mr. Jackson said.
For most of his 20s, there was no danger of that. In an interview with Glamour magazine several years ago, Ms. Kruger lamented her boyfriend’s choice of footwear, remarking, “I definitely wasn’t fond of these blue sneakers that he wore all the time for about a year and a half.”
Reminded of the sneakers and Ms. Kruger’s opinion of them, Mr. Jackson laughed and said, “They just magically disappeared one day.”
He added that when they began dating, “whole trash bags full of clothes were suddenly going to the Salvation Army.”
On this afternoon, Mr. Jackson was dressed in jeans, a gray T-shirt, a field jacket and, yes, sneakers. But the T-shirt fit perfectly, the sneakers were old-school Adidas Superstars, and the Filson jacket was a beautiful shade of butterscotch brown.
He also wore a beard, grown for his role, which he stroked professorially, saying: “You know what I like about a beard? You can always look contemplative.”
The series, which centers on an adulterous relationship between a married father of four living in Brooklyn and a Montauk wife grieving the death of her son, is a highbrow soap, smartly written and compulsively watchable. Mr. Jackson’s character, Cole Lockhart, is the husband of the grieving wife and a blue-collar patriarch of the pregentrified East End (he runs a horse ranch).
As the faithful cuckold, Cole would seem to have the moral high ground. But he deals cocaine and ended the first season waving a gun at his wife and her lover.
“I like that our show presents life in the mucky in-betweens,” the actor said. “It doesn’t take this simple moral position that you easily could about people having an affair.”
In her version, he talked nonstop; in his, he was politely filling in the conversation because she had an allergic reaction to some flowers. Even after nine years, Mr. Jackson said: “The amount of signal to noise in any story I have with Diane amazes me. Sometimes we’re really close, and sometimes we’re so, so, so far off.”
They both agreed he should do “The Affair,” however, even with its graphic and abundant sex scenes. The show presents a noticeably mature Mr. Jackson, whom a generation of TV viewers may still identify as the baby-faced Pacey Witter on “Dawson’s Creek.”
David Semel, a director who worked on “Dawson’s Creek” and has known Mr. Jackson for more than 15 years, said it was only the actor’s early roles that were juvenile.
“He’s always been so mature beyond his years,” Mr. Semel said. “The roles he’s now getting to play are catching up to who he’s been for a long time.”
In person, Mr. Jackson, like Cole, projects logical intelligence and a masculine steadiness. His is a firm handshake.
“Josh has always had a strong, handsome, direct quality to him,” said Sarah Treem, the executive producer of “The Affair,” who cast him partly for that reason. “He’s kind of old-school in his behavior. He’ll always open a door for a woman. He wants to pay for dinner.”
Ms. Treem and her husband live down the street from Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger in Topanga, Calif., where the couple spend much of their time when not in Paris. Something she has noticed and admires about Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger, she said, is the way they closely guard their private lives while still being a high-wattage public couple.
As Ms. Treem put it, Mr. Jackson and Ms. Kruger “rock the red carpet” — something the fashion press has noticed. After the Met Gala last spring, Details magazine named them the best-dressed straight couple, praising Mr. Jackson’s scruffy beard paired with a classic peak-lapel tux.
Mr. Jackson’s friends have noticed his bold style moves, too, and keep him in check should he become a fashion victim. “There was some red carpet where he was wearing an ascot,” Mr. Semel said, laughing. “The male contingency of his friends made sure it was never going to happen again.”
The embrace of the fashion world calls to mind what Samuel L. Jackson’s character says about his eating habits in “Pulp Fiction”: “My girlfriend is a vegetarian, so that pretty much makes me one, too.” In his own way, Mr. Jackson has become a vegetarian.
By ditching the slouch wear for fine tailoring, he has also offered a model for men who find themselves dating up, stylewise: don’t rebel, become stylish yourself.
“It was really through Diane that I finally was able to hear somebody who was telling me, ‘No, part of being an adult male is learning how to dress yourself,’ ” Mr. Jackson said. “There’s a real joy she takes in dressing. I had never seen that before. I feel like that’s now part of our life and something I enjoy, too.”
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