Fifty years ago, Kevin Williamson’s mother gave him a typewriter. It was a very good gift for a 10-year-old boy who loved writing stories. Only, he didn’t know how to use it and promptly slid it aside in favor of his trusty spiral notebooks.
Pen in hand, he crafted his own sequels to “Jaws” and “The Towering Inferno,” along with a series of imagined episodes for “The Six Million Dollar Man.” By the time he got to high school in Pamlico County, N.C., Williamson’s scribbled stories were getting him in trouble. One particularly macabre tale about a date rape and a quarterback who got his arm severed landed Williamson in the counselor’s office.
“It was a little provocative for the classroom,” he conceded, decades later. “I was ahead of my time.”
That love of horror would pulse through Williamson’s screenplays in the early days of his career for the ‘90s high-school slashers “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” But his quieter teenage traumas and triumphs, the kind that occurred when he wasn’t busy jotting down ideas and making Super 8 home movies, played out on “Dawson’s Creek.”
Within that semi-autobiographical WB melodrama that Williamson created and helmed for its first two seasons, he laid bare pieces of his own coming of age in a small town, as told through an ensemble of attractive teenagers prone to erudite conversations and sexual longing.
“[Kevin] felt like a friend who was excited to go make a movie in his backyard,” said James Van Der Beek, who starred as the titular character Dawson, in an email. “Even the way he ‘pitched’ storylines — it was never a pitch. It was a campfire story about people he cared about that he’d unfold in such a simple, compelling way that you couldn’t help but care about them too.”
Now with his new Netflix drama series, “The Waterfront,” premiering Thursday, Williamson is getting back to those roots, engaging once again with his personal history and the type of relationship-driven project that garnered him early TV success.
Both “Dawson’s” and “The Waterfront” were shot in Wilmington, N.C., not far from where Williamson’s own family hails, and they both feature sun-dappled arguments, shift work at seafood restaurants and porch-front declarations of love. Class disparities are explored, and boats bob in marinas as characters grapple with their own morality and mortality.
But in “The Waterfront,” Williamson’s main characters are a multigenerational cast of adults whose lives are glossier and grittier than what audiences remember from the “Dawson’s” gang. And Williamson, at 60, is no longer an industry ingenue.
“I can’t sit around and tell teenage stories all my life,” Williamson said. “I need to grow up.”
If “Dawson’s Creek” was a mirror of Williamson’s starry-eyed years spent idolizing Steven Spielberg and dreaming of making it out of his small town, “The Waterfront” tells a murkier chapter of his family history.
In 1983, when Williamson was a freshman in college, his father, Wade, was arrested for his part in an elaborate smuggling ring that used fishing boats to transport millions of dollars worth of drugs along the North Carolina coast. The commercial fisherman was ultimately charged with conspiracy to traffic marijuana in excess of 20,000 pounds. (Not coincidentally, that’s the same crime Joey Potter’s dad is charged with on “Dawson’s Creek.”)
“I wanted to tell this story for a really long time,” Williamson said. “My dad just said, ‘Wait until I’m dead and get Kevin Costner to play me.’”
Williamson spent the 2010s creating a variety of supernatural and crime series, including “The Vampire Diaries” and “The Following.” Then, after his dad died in 2020, he got to work penning a version of his father’s story via “The Waterfront.”
Enter the Buckleys: Patriarch Harlan (played by Holt McCallany, whom Williamson said was a “much closer” match to his dad than Costner), matriarch Belle (Maria Bello) and their millennial kids Bree (Melissa Benoist) and Cane (Jake Weary), a family whose North Carolina fishing empire is being kept afloat by their entanglement in a drug smuggling ring. Heightening the stakes, they’re trafficking opium instead of marijuana.
“One of my favorite things I’ve ever heard Kevin say is he likes to create characters that are good people that do bad things and, hopefully, find their way back to being good,” said Danielle Campbell, who plays Cane’s wife, Peyton, and previously worked with Williamson on his thriller series “Tell Me a Story.”
And then there are the just plain baddies. “The Waterfront” guest stars Topher Grace as a diabolical drug lord named Grady, a role that Williamson wrote specifically for the actor. It’s a far cry from the boy next door Grace played on “That ‘70s Show,” which put him on the map at the same time as the “Dawson’s” kids.
“It was so delicious and well written. And, personally, I wanted to work with Kevin because I was a fan,” Grace said. “But that’s actually never a precursor of whether you’re going to like working with the person.” After shooting his episodes, which included a scene in which Grady gleefully engages in torture-by-jellyfish, however, Grace was relieved. “What do they say at a restaurant? 10 out of 10. Would recommend.”
In a family of fishermen, Williamson was the first to go to college. It was partly made possible, he believes, by the success of his dad’s illicit business. While the money still wasn’t enough to afford his dream school, NYU, it paved the way to a scholarship at nearby East Carolina University where Williamson, who had been a theater kid in high school, studied acting and trained in the Meisner technique. After graduation, he moved to New York to try his hand at acting professionally, while still writing plays in his spare time.
“Going off to New York — it was terrifying,” he said. “No one from my small town had made it, so I thought, what are the odds? Why don’t I just get a job at the local newspaper and become a little reporter for the Pamlico News? But that fear is also what drove me out of town. I was so scared of failing.”
He secured a few minor acting roles in the early 1990s, including episodes of the soap “Another World” and the sketch show “In Living Color,” before deciding to focus on his love of storytelling. “Acting wasn’t me,” he said. “I wanted to write and direct and produce, all these other things that revolved around actors.”
So he got a job working as an assistant to director Paris Barclay, a gig that brought Williamson to Los Angeles, where he took a screenwriting class at UCLA on the side. As his passion for writing continued to bloom — he wrote the screenplay that became “Teaching Mrs. Tingle” in that extension course — his enthusiasm for assisting Barclay dwindled.
“He fired me, rightfully so,” Williamson said. “I started collecting unemployment. Then the unemployment ran out and I was desperate and starving. I was borrowing money from friends and dog walking and house sitting, doing all these odd jobs to pay the rent. And then I sold a script, finally. I was a 10-year overnight success story.”
“Scream” changed everything. When the Wes Craven-directed film was released in 1996, it became the highest-grossing slasher to date, and studios leaped to read more of Williamson’s writing. A string of horror projects unfolded from there, including “Scream 2,” “The Faculty” and one that hit slightly closer to home: “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
The killer in “Last Summer,” which was set in Southport, N.C., and filmed around the area, is a fisherman whose weapon of choice for slaughtering teenagers is a hook. Was that a metaphor for Williamson’s own fears of getting trapped in the family business? Looking back, Williamson said, “I was like, oh, yeah, this must be my subconscious telling me that a career in fishing will kill me.”
But the connective tissue between Williamson’s love of horror films and his upbringing are rooted in a different kind of fear, he said: being a closeted gay kid who “was always running and trying to escape the truth.”
“I was the final girl. I was Jamie Lee Curtis. I was Laurie Strode,” he said. “I always felt like I was the little gay kid trapped in a small Southern town that was very conservative, and I didn’t belong. I always felt like I was trying to survive, to get through the day. I grew up in a time where it was still very closeted in the South, and I was very scared to be who I was.”
Even when “Dawson’s Creek” was snapped up by the WB in 1996 and Williamson was encouraged to mine his own life for material, he was, at first, afraid to write a queer character.
“I wanted a gay character in ‘Dawson’s Creek’ from the very beginning,” he said. “But the same Kevin who was scared to leave [North Carolina] was the Kevin who was scared to pitch a gay character in his show.”
Instead, the main love triangle of “Dawson’s Creek” focused on the heterosexual tension of whether Josephine “Joey” Potter (Katie Holmes) would choose Dawson Leery or Pacey Witter (Joshua Jackson). Williamson did, however, intentionally give Joey a masculine nickname in a coded nod to his own sexuality.
And when the network asked him to expand the “Dawson’s” ensemble in Season 2, Williamson was ready to introduce Jack McPhee (Kerr Smith), a character who was initially closeted and dated Joey before coming out as gay; later, he shared a groundbreaking on-screen kiss with another man.
“I remember watching the scene with [Jack coming out to] his dad and crying,” Holmes said. “I was just so proud of the work that they did and the writing that Kevin did. I loved it like a fan.”
Fast forward 2½ decades, and “The Waterfront” features a suave, queer character named Shawn who gets a job as a bartender at the Buckleys’ seafood restaurant. Shawn is played by out actor Rafael L. Silva, but the character’s sexuality is only noted in passing, and his relationship with his boyfriend is a nonentity.
“Thank goodness we’re at a place in storytelling where being gay isn’t a big deal,” Williamson said. “Everything’s not a coming out story. The bigger issue is, why is Shawn there? Who is he to his family? That’s the bigger issue, which has nothing to do with being gay.”
Still, Williamson became visibly moved while discussing the impact his work has had on younger generations of queer fans. “There are so many people that have come up to me and said, ‘I’m a writer because of you,’ ” he said, choking back tears. “I’ve had so many inspirations, so if I can be part of that to someone else, I’m all for it.”
Actors who have worked with Williamson over the years often praise his collaborative nature and down-to-earth approachability, on and off set.
Holmes was only 18 when she was cast as Joey, the snarky girl next door on “Dawson’s Creek.” She recalled Williamson being “very protective” of her and her co-stars as they navigated their early fame, making sure they got home safely when they traveled for events and listening to their ideas for their characters between takes.
“He cared so much, and he still cares so much,” Holmes said. “That was probably part of what people felt when they watched the show, that we really cared about each other, and Kevin set that precedent.”
Tackling the “elevated psychobabble” that Williamson wrote for the “Dawson’s” teens, which quickly became a signature of the series, proved more of a challenge.
“I mispronounced words in every single read-through, and I was usually mortified,” Holmes said, laughing. “It still traumatizes me at read-throughs. I’m like, oh my God, oh my God, please don’t mess up a word. It was a good training ground.”
Although the executives at Sony had insisted Williamson re-set “Dawson’s Creek” in Massachusetts (“I think there was some concern that it might limit the appeal of the show if it was too Southern,” Williamson said), “Dawson’s” was still shot around the coastal North Carolina town of Wilmington, where the EUE/Screen Gems studios (now CineSpace studios) were based.
It meant that even as the young cast landed magazine covers and racked up Teen Choice Award nominations, they were mostly sheltered from the limelight and temptations of fame while shooting 20-plus-episode seasons.
“I often joke that Wilmington is the reason none of us ended up in jail,” Van Der Beek said. “We were not around any of the elements of Hollywood that sink so many souls. Instead, we were riding jet skis to Masonboro Island and hanging out with the crew on the weekends. You could act like a privileged jerk, technically, but you were going to be lonely on the weekends if you did.”
For the “Waterfront” cast, Williamson’s legacy in Wilmington and its surrounds was ever present. Posters of his past projects still proudly hang in downtown shops, and the local tourism website offers a self-guided tour of “Dawson’s” filming locations.
Benoist, known for her roles on “Supergirl” and “Glee,” grew up watching “Dawson’s Creek” and had harbored a childhood crush on Van Der Beek. While playing Bree on “The Waterfront,” she worked on some of the same soundstages that once housed the “Dawson’s” sets and stood on the very sites where iconic “Dawson’s” moments once occurred.
“It became very clear, very quickly, that Kevin kind of runs the city,” she said. “It’s so synonymous with him.”
These days, Williamson is mulling retirement. But not seriously.
He recently directed the upcoming “Scream 7” — his first time helming an installment of the franchise he created. As part of the overall deal he and his production company, Outerbanks Entertainment, have with Universal Television, he’s also got series adaptations of the films “Rear Window” and “The Game,” as well as of Ruth Ware’s novel “The It Girl,” in the works.
Some bucket list items remain unchecked. Williamson, who lives in Los Angeles with his husband, actor Victor Turpin, has yet to meet his filmmaking idol, Spielberg. “I sat behind him at a movie premiere once. I’m very familiar with the back of his head,” Williamson said. “He’s God to me, and, you know, you don’t want to meet God until God wants to meet you.”
And then there’s the crime drama that Williamson is itching to write based on another real-life family incident involving his mom and what he described as a “domestic murder.”
“I still have so many stories I want to tell,” he said. “I just have to figure out how to do them.”
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