Joshua Jackson on how audiobooks expand his imagination as a performer

CBC

11-07-2025

From Dawson's Creek to Little Fires Everywhere, Vancouver-born actor Joshua Jackson is known for taking on characters enmeshed in the drama of the every day. As a reader, he's drawn towards fictional dramas that err on the side of the supernatural.
On The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing, Jackson shares that some of his favourite books include Farley Mowat's Canadian classic Never Cry Wolf, Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Joshua Jackson had to make a tricky transition before Dawson's Creek
"Sci-fi is not necessarily my go-to, but it has been over the course of my life," he says. "I love going back to this world because I find new things when I come back to it and it does an amazing job of taking me to an absolutely out of my possibility realm, but allowing my feet to be on the ground there."
He brings his love of sci-fi and fantasy into his audiobook narration of Andrew Pyper's thriller series, Oracle, where he plays Nate Russo, an FBI agent who solves homicide cases through psychic visions. The series continues in Oracle 3: Murder at the Grandview where Russo is called in to piece together a tragedy on an island after a friend reunion goes awry.
The latest instalment is the first audiobook by Pyper to be released posthumously. The celebrated Canadian writer was best known for his spine-tingling novels, including Lost Girls and The Demonologist and William, a modern haunted house novel written under the pseudonym Mason Coile.
Pyper died on Jan. 3, 2025 at the age of 56.
Jackson credited Pyper's lush and eerie description as one of the main reasons he took on the project, "He creates these [audiobooks] in a way that is hard to do with the written word."
"[Pyper] creates textural worlds: the walls are dripping and the air is heavy and the characters are embodied," says Jackson. "In our case, it makes the horror feel, at least for me, present … I can see this world in my head as it's unfolding on the page."
For Jackson, reading in the form of audiobooks only adds to his experience of a story, especially in speculative fiction where you often have to suspend your disbelief and imagine otherworldly places.
"I find that the experience of an audiobook allows my imagination to wander," he says. "I find flights of fancy much easier to digest in an audiobook format than, say, denser texts."
Jackson's narration of Pyper's Oracle 3: Murder at the Grandview is available as part of Amazon's Canadian Audible Original series.