Katie Holmes’s Joey Potter helped make Dawson’s Creek a weekly appointment for a generation of television viewers.
Holmes has continued acting while becoming a filmmaker and a regular presence in theater. In 2026, she starred in Hedda Gabler in San Diego and premiered Happy Hours, the film she wrote and directed opposite her former Dawson’s Creek co-star Joshua Jackson.
For anyone who mostly remembers Joey, the later career can be easy to miss. Much of it has unfolded in independent films, festival screenings and stage productions rather than another long-running television series.
Joey Potter was the beginning of a wider career
Holmes played Joey through all six seasons of Dawson’s Creek, which ran from 1998 to 2003. The role placed her inside one of television’s most closely followed young ensembles.
She also pursued films during those years. Her credits included Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Peter Hedges’s Pieces of April, followed by Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking. Her UTA career profile records that range.
Pieces of April gave her a particularly different setting: a young woman trying to bring an estranged family together around Thanksgiving dinner. Batman Begins, by contrast, put her inside an enormous studio production as Rachel Dawes. Fandango’s biography traces both roles.
Maggie Gyllenhaal later played Rachel in The Dark Knight. Both performers eventually developed directing careers, though through very different films.
Photo: MC1 Chad J. McNeeley / U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
All We Had began her work as a feature director
Holmes made her feature directing debut with All We Had, which premiered at Tribeca in 2016.
She also starred as Rita, a mother whose unsettled circumstances place pressure on her daughter Ruthie, played by Stefania Owen. The story follows their attempt to find stability and the limits of the help offered by people around them.
The Tribeca festival’s description centers the relationship between mother and daughter and the resilience they draw from each other.
Directing and acting in the same project gave Holmes two kinds of responsibility. She had to inhabit Rita while also shaping the film around Ruthie’s experience.
It was an important expansion of her career. A familiar face from television was now responsible for the choices that connected performances, setting and story across an entire feature.
Alone Together and Rare Objects developed that direction
Holmes returned to directing with Alone Together, a romance that premiered at Tribeca in 2022.
She wrote, produced and starred in the film as June, a food critic whose escape from New York during the early pandemic goes wrong when her accommodation has been double-booked. The unexpected company creates the possibility of a different relationship. Tribeca’s film record describes the story and Holmes’s multiple credits.
The following year brought Rare Objects. Holmes directed and co-wrote the drama, which follows a young woman rebuilding her life through work in a New York antique shop.
Its cast includes Julia Mayorga, Alan Cumming and Holmes herself. The distributor’s page confirms the April 2023 release and Holmes’s work as director, producer and co-writer with Phaedon Papadopoulos.
These films show a recurring interest in people trying to begin again. Their scale is intimate, often built around conversations, damaged relationships and the possibility of connection.
Our Town brought her back to Broadway
Theater has also become a substantial part of Holmes’s working life.
Her Broadway credits include All My Sons and Dead Accounts. In 2024, she returned as Mrs. Webb in Kenny Leon’s revival of Our Town, alongside Jim Parsons and Zoey Deutch.
The production opened on October 10, 2024, and closed on January 19, 2025, according to the Internet Broadway Database.
Thornton Wilder’s play follows ordinary life in Grover’s Corners, giving daily routines, family relationships and missed moments unusual emotional weight. The Tony Awards’ production page records the revival’s large ensemble and central story.
For Holmes, it meant joining a company rather than carrying a vehicle built around her screen fame. The performance existed in a theater each night, requiring a different rhythm from film production.
Photo: Bryan Berlin / Wikimedia Commons, cropped version, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hedda Gabler became another demanding stage role
In early 2026, Holmes took on the title role in Hedda Gabler at San Diego’s Old Globe.
The production used a new version by Erin Cressida Wilson, directed by Barry Edelstein. Holmes played a woman returning from her honeymoon whose restless attempts to control the people around her become increasingly destructive.
Demand prompted two extensions. The theater announced that the run would conclude on March 22, 2026, in its official extension notice.
That engagement is a useful measure of where Holmes’s attention has been. Taking on a major Ibsen role requires sustained rehearsal and performance, even when it generates fewer everyday headlines than a television reunion.
It also continued her movement between creating her own screen projects and interpreting other writers’ work onstage.
Happy Hours reunited her with Joshua Jackson
Holmes’s 2026 film Happy Hours brought a familiar partnership into a new story.
She plays Liz, a recently divorced photographer who reconnects with former boyfriend Andrew, played by Jackson. The characters have years of experience and unresolved feelings between them when their paths cross again in New York.
The film premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Its official festival entry identifies Holmes as writer, director and star, with Constance Wu and Mary-Louise Parker among the supporting cast.
The reunion naturally carries memories of Joey and Pacey. The film itself, however, concerns different characters meeting again as adults, with the disappointments and choices of intervening years shaping their relationship.
Holmes has discussed the project as a potential trilogy, but the festival premiere establishes the first film’s arrival, not the completion of three movies.
As of November 2026, her career includes directing, acting and substantial theater work. The teenager viewers met in Dawson’s Creek has become a performer who also writes the scenes, chooses the collaborators and helps decide which stories reach the screen.