James Van Der Beek, who became a teen idol on ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ dies at 48

Rachel Pannet

James Van Der Beek, who became a 1990s teen idol as the clean-cut, floppy-haired title character on Dawson’s Creek, and who went on to a busy screen career that included self-deprecating comic roles on shows such as Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23” has died. He was 48.

His family announced the death in a post on his official Instagram account, which did not say where he died. Van Der Beek revealed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

The show that catapulted him to wide recognition, Dawson’s Creek, followed the lives of four teenagers in the fictional New England town of Capeside. Van Der Beek played the titular Dawson Leery, a sensitive, romantic 15-year-old with dreams of becoming a filmmaker. “All the mysteries of the universe, all the answers to life’s questions, can be found in a Spielberg film,” he says.

Premiering on the newly launched WB network in 1998, the show represented a small-town version of Beverly Hills, 90210, complete with its own friend-group love triangle. New York Times television critic Caryn James called it “pure soap, redeemed by intelligence and sharp writing.”

Van Der Beek was 20, a college freshman with a few small film and theatre credits to his name, when his mom persuaded him to try out for the series. Show creator Kevin Williamson, who had written the screenplays for the teen slasher films Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, later said that Van Der Beek seemed especially nervous in the audition and showed an appealing vulnerability that made him a natural fit for the role of a thoughtful, naive teenager.

Never mind that Van Der Beek was five years older than his character; the actor joked that a good razor was essential.

Dawson’s Creek ran for six seasons and made an instant star of the show’s leads, including Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams. Van Der Beek, who said he needed a police escort to get away from “an angry, screaming mob of teenage girls” soon after the pilot aired, capitalised on his success with a starring role in the coming-of-age movie Varsity Blues (1999), about a Texas high school football team.

He said he put on 10 pounds of muscle to play the quarterback Mox, who comes off the bench to lead the team to victory while also standing up to his tyrannical coach (played by Jon Voight) and his football-obsessed father (“I don’t want your life!”).

The film grossed $52 million and helped propel Van Der Beek to starring roles in the western Texas Rangers (2001) and the R-rated black comedy The Rules of Attraction (2002), in which he played a drug-dealing college student. His character, Sean, seemed to be the opposite of Dawson, even as Van Der Beek proved “innately likable,” as filmmaker Roger Avary put it, “while trying to portray darkness.”

Having spent years perfecting the art of being a teenager, lightening his dark, bushy eyebrows and shaving twice a day, Van Der Beek said it was difficult to persuade directors to see him as a grown-up. He struggled to transition into adult roles while mainly appearing in TV guest spots, including on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother and the crime procedural Criminal Minds, in which he played a psychotic serial killer.

He revived his career partly by poking fun at himself. After an ugly-cry sequence from Dawson’s Creek became a popular GIF - his character is shown breaking down in tears after splitting up with Holmes (“Just go. Go!” he says, before his face crumples) - Van Der Beek starred in a satirical video for the website Funny or Die in 2011, imagining a collection of “Vandermemes” that people could use for dozens of occasions.

“The more I saw websites’ comment sections mocking the sadness of others,” he says, “the more I realised what the internet was really demanding: more intense emotional close-ups of my face.”

The next year, Van Der Beek began playing a comically self-absorbed, underemployed and hypersexual version of himself on Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, an ABC sitcom starring Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker.

The show was cancelled after two seasons but was well-received, paving the way for Van Der Beek’s later work on What Would Diplo Do? (2017), a Viceland comedy series in which he played an exaggerated version of the celebrity DJ and producer, repeatedly saying the word “fam” and imagining what it would be like if Jesus were on Twitter.

“What makes this work … is the Van Der Beek straddle, the tension between the hipsterdom he seems to aspire to and the normality he can’t help projecting,” wrote Times television critic Mike Hale.

Van Der Beek, who also wrote and produced the show, observed that his earlier success on Dawson’s Creek had established certain expectations surrounding his screen persona, which he could either embrace or unsettle.

“I kind of wish we lived in that halcyon era of actors disappearing into every role, but that’s just not the case any more,” he told the Times in 2017. “To try to run away from it is just not effective. So part of the meta thing was just running toward it and playing with it - and then subverting it.”

A career of taking chances

James Van Der Beek Jr., the eldest of three siblings, was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, on March 8, 1977. His father, a former minor league baseball player, worked for a phone company. His mother was a gym teacher and former Broadway dancer.

Van Der Beek took up acting in the eighth grade, when he sustained a concussion during gym class and was told to stop playing football for at least a year.

While in high school at the private Cheshire Academy in 1994, he commuted to Manhattan to perform in the off-Broadway play Finding the Sun, written and directed by Edward Albee. He was soon appearing in movies, playing a high school bully in the coming-of-age comedy Angus (1995) and landing a bit part in the little-seen romantic drama I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), starring Claire Danes, Jude Law and Jeanne Moreau.

As his acting career stalled, Van Der Beek enrolled at Drew University in New Jersey, studying English and sociology. Then came Dawson’s Creek and his rapid ascent to fame, which he called “dehumanising”.

“If you look at those first billboards from Dawson’s Creek, we all look exhausted,” he told the entertainment website Vulture in 2013. “Back then, man, I was working fourteen-hour days, sixteen-hour days, five days a week, and then on the weekends you show up for photo shoots for eight to ten hours. … And for me, personally, it all happened so quickly and I felt like I hadn’t really asked for that much.”

Van Der Beek later tried to branch out as an action star, training in jujitsu and Krav Maga before being cast in CSI: Cyber, which premiered on CBS in 2015 and ran for two seasons, with a cast that included Patricia Arquette.

In 2018, he appeared in the first season of Pose, an FX drama about the 1980s house ball scene, as a cocaine-snorting executive in the Trump Organization.

Van Der Beek traded Hollywood for a quieter life on a ranch in Texas in 2020 after his wife, the former Kimberley Brook, suffered a string of miscarriages, including one while he was appearing on the reality show Dancing With the Stars. The couple had six children.

His first marriage, to actress Heather McComb, ended in divorce. 

Shortly after revealing his cancer diagnosis, Van Der Beek announced he was selling signed Varsity Blues merchandise to help families struggling with the cost of cancer treatments, including his own. He also stripped down to appear in The Real Full Monty, a television special in which a group of male celebrities shed their clothes to raise awareness for prostate, testicular, and colorectal cancer testing and research.

Despite the range he demonstrated in his later years, Van Der Beek remained best known for his breakthrough TV role, and said he was still occasionally called Dawson by strangers.

“That’s what they’ll remember until I give them an excuse to remember me by a different name,” he told the Times in 2010, “and then they’ll call me that for a little while. But it is one of the highest forms of flattery if they associate you so closely with a character. It means they bought it. So I try to think of it as a compliment.”