The Moment
Jackson White is out here giving his mom, Katey Sagal, the kind of flowers most kids save for a eulogy – and doing it on one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
In a recent appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” the Tell Me Lies star opened up about using alcohol as a coping mechanism, growing up between divorced parents, and realizing just how much of his emotional playbook came from resentment and chaos.
At the center of it all? His mother, the once-wild, now-very-sober TV icon who played Peg Bundy and Gemma Teller.
“My mom got her s-t together,” White said on the show. “She did, she got her s-t together a long time ago. And I got to see that you can get your s-t together. So I had a really great example in my mom.”
He went on to say that he wants “a lot of things” in this life – family, career, stability – and that if you keep missing auditions, snapping on the phone, or reacting badly, that’s your sign something’s off. “You just gotta focus on it. You gotta have that self-knowledge,” he told host Alexandra Cooper, adding that real consequences are often what finally push change into action.
Oh, and he did all this while also talking about working opposite his real-life girlfriend, Grace Van Patten, on a show about a toxic relationship. Because what is Hollywood if not a family systems workshop with craft services?
The Take
I love this trend of celebrity kids breaking the fourth wall on how messy it actually was growing up in “cool” households. For a long time, the script was: famous parent, chaotic childhood, then either full rebellion or tight-lipped denial. Jackson is doing something in between – calling it what it was, but also refusing to turn his mother into a villain.
There’s something powerful about a grown son saying, essentially, my mom cleaned up her life, and that gave me permission to clean up mine. It’s not glossy. It’s not a rehab press tour. It’s just: I saw it, it worked, maybe I should try that too.
And let’s be real: Katey Sagal is not some squeaky-clean Disney mom archetype. This is the woman who played a chain-smoking biker matriarch in Sons of Anarchy and a horny, big-haired sitcom wife in Married… With Children. The fact that she quietly got stable, built a long career, and apparently became the “example” in the family? That’s a twist even Gemma Teller couldn’t have plotted.
Jackson also hit on something Hollywood rarely admits: when your job is pretending to be in love with someone, fighting with someone, breaking up with someone – and that someone is also your real-life partner or your actual mother – the lines are going to blur. He basically shrugged and said, yeah, if you do make-believe for a living, you’re probably a little messed up, and it’s hard not to take some of that home.
In other words, this is less a scandal and more a sober (pun fully intended) look at what happens when you mix generational baggage, addiction, and showbiz. It’s like watching someone finally read the instruction manual for a car they’ve been driving since they were 12.
Receipts
Confirmed:
- Jackson White discussed his use of alcohol as a coping mechanism, growing up with divorced parents, and learning from his mother’s turnaround in a recent episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast with host Alexandra Cooper.
- On that episode, he said of Katey Sagal: “My mom got her s-t together” and called her a “great example” for showing it’s possible to turn your life around.
- White described noticing red flags like missing auditions, reacting poorly on the phone, and letting consequences push him toward change.
- He confirmed he worked with his real-life girlfriend, actress Grace Van Patten, on the drama Tell Me Lies, where they played on-screen love interests in a toxic relationship.
- Katey Sagal, 72, became widely known for playing Peggy Bundy on Married… With Children and later won a Golden Globe for her role as Gemma Teller Morrow on Sons of Anarchy, according to awards records and industry databases.
Unverified / Interpretation:
- Any deeper details about Sagal’s personal recovery journey (timelines, treatment, specific struggles) beyond what her son and past interviews have touched on remain private; we only know what they’ve chosen to share.
- The idea that Jackson’s current choices around alcohol or relationships are directly “fixed” is my read on his comments about wanting more for himself and responding to consequences, not something he labeled as complete or finished.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you lost track of the Sagal family somewhere around the last Bush administration, here’s the quick refresher. Katey Sagal became a sitcom legend as Peg Bundy on Married… With Children in the late ’80s and ’90s – all big hair, animal prints, and eye-rolls at Al. She later reinvented herself as Gemma Teller, the ruthless matriarch on the biker drama Sons of Anarchy, nabbing a Golden Globe along the way. Off-screen, she’s been open over the years about past struggles and getting sober. Her son Jackson White is part of the newer TV wave: he broke out on Tell Me Lies, a moody Hulu series about a toxic, addictive college romance, where he stars opposite Grace Van Patten, who is also his real-life partner.
What’s Next
In terms of headlines, this isn’t a meltdown; it’s more like a family progress report. Expect more of this kind of honesty from Jackson – he comes off like someone who’s realized oversharing is sometimes healthier than pretending everything’s fine, especially when your job is to sell believable dysfunction on screen.
For Katey, this moment quietly boosts a different part of her legacy. Yes, she’s Peg, she’s Gemma, she’s done a tour of duty on shows like 8 Simple Rules, The Conners, Shameless, and Rebel. But now she’s also the mom whose grown son publicly credits her with showing that long-term change is possible. In Hollywood, that might be rarer than the Golden Globe.
The bigger cultural ripple? We’re seeing more adult children of celebrities talk honestly about divorce, addiction, and messy coping without turning it into a blame game. It’s less “my parents ruined me” and more “this is the material I inherited – now what am I going to build with it?”
And if you strip away the famous names, what Jackson describes – watching a parent pull their life together and slowly realizing you might need to do the same – sounds very familiar. Fame just adds better lighting and a podcast mic.
What do you make of kids of famous parents going public with this kind of raw family history – healing, oversharing, or a bit of both?
Sources: Jackson White’s interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast with Alexandra Cooper (February 2026 episode); publicly available career and awards records for Katey Sagal and Jackson White (including industry databases and award listings, accessed 2026).
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