Joshua Jackson reveals advice from Emilio Estevez on ‘Mighty Ducks’

Listen to Emilio Estevez if you want to learn.

“Emilio gave me a ton of great advice,” Joshua Jackson told Brooke Shields, who filled in for Kelly Clarkson today while the music superstar was absent from her regular hosting duties on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I learned how to be on set from Emilio. I was just a child.”

Jackson recounted a moment from the set of the second Mighty Ducks film, D2: The Mighty Ducks, when he “blew past” a line of autograph seekers to get to the locker room. “Emilio pulled me to the side and just said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Don’t ever, ever do that again. Why do you think you get to go out there and skate in front of all those people? This is who keeps you employed; do not ever forget who it is that you are here for,'” Jackson recalled.

Jackson said he can’t remember why he displayed such impertinence toward the fans, but Estevez’s forceful reproach immediately recalibrated his decision-making and led to a lasting behavioral change.

“It was a really important reframing for my 15-year-old self,” he said. “Remember who you are, and what’s actually important.”

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Jackson appeared alongside Estevez in all three entries in the original film franchise, which charted the trials, errors, and miraculous victories of a fictional youth hockey team based in Minnesota. Estevez starred as Gordon Bombay, a cocky lawyer who’s sentenced to community service after a DUI, a sentence that eventually takes the form of coaching the pee-wee players.

Bombay forms a close bond with one of the team’s pivotal players, Jackson’s character Charlie Conway, who eventually becomes captain of the Ducks and leads the team to a major victory at the end of 1996’s D3: The Mighty Ducks.

Jackson and Estevez wouldn’t appear in another Mighty Ducks project after D3, though Estevez did appear in the first season of the Disney+ revival series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, and Jackson appeared in Bobby, the JFK ensemble drama Estevez wrote and directed in 2006.

The actor has spoken highly of his experiences with Estevez over the years, commenting during a 2018 SAG-AFTRA career retrospective that, “It wasn’t until, because you don’t listen to your parents, I got to the set of The Might Ducks, that Emilio, by example, was like, ‘This is how you can do this.’… It was him laying that groundwork that has probably been the reason that I have been able to maintain this career for all these years.”

You can watch the rest of Jackson’s interview with Shields on today’s Kelly Clarkson Show below.