It’s never fun to trend on Twitter, unless you’re Hugh Grant or a Kardashian. But it happened to Joshua Jackson recently, and he was understandably confused and a little frightened.
“When it happened to me, I felt like I must have done something terrible,” Jackson told Jimmy Fallon of the viral moment. In reality, people were just amazed at one particular scene from Dawson’s Creek in which the laws of physics were seemingly suspended and we all became Pacey being hit in the face by a basketball thrown by Dawson. High school is the worst!!
This shot in Dawsons’s Creek is blowing my mind. pic.twitter.com/0cpbbvwbDt
— JΔY CHΣΣL (@JayCheel) April 12, 2023
Jackson explained, “You know Twitter has its ups and downs, but one of the things I love about Twitter is — man, people get into it,” Jackson told Fallon on The Tonight Show. Yes, they really do get into it. He continued, “So when I did finally get back to my trailer and realized I hadn’t screwed up, I wasn’t dead, and my career wasn’t over, all good things, there’s like a forensic analysis of this 25-year-old TV show,” the actor joked.
While many people assumed it was movie magic or a camera trick, Jackson let everyone in on a secret. “People are going frame-by-frame, ‘Well, you can see he dodged the ball at the wrong time, so the ball’s not…’ This was just a beach ball! Painted to look like a basketball, that got bounced off of my face,” the actor revealed.
Even though it might be more fun to think about a team of animators perfectly styling a 7-second clip, the fact that it was just a beach ball does make sense. Pacey had already been through so much at this point, they had to cut him a little slack. Though he sort of deserved it for calling Dawson an Oompa Loompa. Even though Hugh Grant is going to make everyone love Oompas again really soon!
Check out the full clip above.