Why Joshua Jackson Is Comparing His ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Audition to ‘The Hunger Games’

Joshua Jackson‘s audition for Dawson’s Creek was a competition, to say the least.

During a recent appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast, the Doctor Odyssey actor recalled auditioning for the hit drama series, comparing it to The Hunger Games.

“I think I had, like, nine auditions,” he said. “I think first for Pacey, then for Dawson, then back to Pacey,” before ultimately landing the role of teen heartthrob Pacey Witter. James Van Der Beek ended up playing Dawson.

However, it was the final audition when Jackson said things got a bit odd. “They take you to the Warner Brothers Ranch. I don’t even know if this place exists anymore,” Jackson recalled. “And the WB had this Quonset hut basically off on the side. And when you walk in, there’s a giant gong and a woman at the desk whose job it is to say, ‘W, W, WB,’ every time she answers the phone,” imitating the network’s famed jingle.

“I shit you not,” The Affair actor continued. “And in that room are 35 potential kids who are now put into this Hunger Games moment. And you spend literally the entire day getting called in groups.” He recalled groups of two and four going into the back to audition, “and then, you come out and four people are just gone. And then two people are gone.”

Jackson remembered being there for “an entire day, until the sun goes down.” But once the final cut of auditions rolled around, he said he was in washroom at the time and heard the gong go off.

“I come out of the toilet, and now every executive from the WB has come from every office everywhere and is just standing there staring at me and James and Katie [Holmes] and Michelle [Williams] as we’re like, ‘Oh, this is where they eat us, I guess,’” he quipped. But they actually told the four young actors, “Congratulations. You just got the job.”

Jackson said he didn’t even know “which role it was” that he landed initially, adding that it was “uncomfortable” just standing in the room.

“That’s how they used to do their castings,” he explained. “If you hit the gong, everybody has to scurry out of the office to get whatever the news is, and I would like to think that at some point, somebody there was like, ‘This is not great. This is weird.’”

Dawson’s Creek, which ran for six seasons from 1998-2003, followed a group of friends navigating their teen years and early adulthood in the fictional town of Capeside, Massachusetts.

Jackson added that once he was cast in the show, “I was astonishingly appreciative of the paycheck and the change that that made in my life. You know, I always enjoyed acting and performing and so I was also astonished that I was like, ‘Hey, I can do this. I’m being allowed to do this every day.’”