James Van Der Beek, the golden-haired actor who starred as a coastal-town teenager facing the onslaught of first love and first sex in “Dawson’s Creek,” a popular turn-of-the-millennium TV drama series, died on Wednesday. He was 48.
The death was announced in an Instagram post from his official account. Mr. Van Der Beek revealed that he had colorectal cancer in November 2024.
When “Dawson’s Creek” began, in 1998, Mr. Van Der Beek was its 15-year-old protagonist, Dawson Leery, a wide-eyed, fresh-faced high school sophomore and seemingly perennial virgin. An aspiring filmmaker, Dawson was too sensitive, vulnerable and self-involved for his own good — and like all of the show’s unflappable teenage characters, he was articulate beyond his years.
“Why is my mere presence suddenly a detriment to your happiness?” he asked one boy in Season 2. He knew, he said, the “unyielding, merciless torture” of unrequited love. To his best male friend, he gave impossibly mature relationship advice: “The only thing you can really do is make sure that the time she spends with you is as stress-free as possible.”
Kevin Williamson, the series’ creator, admitted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that the young characters in the show were “a little stylized in the way they talk,” but with good reason. “It was all about the behavior, what they’re trying to say.”
Caryn James, reviewing the show in The New York Times on its debut, on the WB network, praised the characters’ “sophisticated awareness.” Some critics were offended by the show’s frank treatment of sexuality, however, and at least one major corporation, Procter & Gamble, changed its mind about being a co-producer, much less a sponsor.
WB, only three years old at the time, was catapulted to success by the show’s enormous popularity, particularly among its teenage demographic. When the series ended, six seasons later, Dawson — in a case of art imitating life — was a successful, sexually confident college dropout with his own hit TV series. Mr. Van Der Beek was all of 26.
Later, he found himself reflecting on the little indignities that accompanied all that fame.
Asked in 2023 what advice he would give his younger self, he said on “Good Morning America,” choosing to be philosophical: “Don’t be surprised if six years of work gets reduced to a three-second GIF of you crying,” adding, “It’s all good.”
James David Van Der Beek was born on March 8, 1977, in Cheshire, Conn., north of New Haven. He was the eldest of three children of Melinda (Weber) Van Der Beek, a dancer and gymnastics teacher, and James William Van Der Beek, a telephone company executive.
James, who acted in school productions, was 15 when he asked his mother to drive him into New York City to find an agent.
A year or so later, he made his New York stage debut in “Sand,” an evening of three one-act Edward Albee plays directed by Mr. Albee and presented by the Signature Theater Company. David Richards, The Times’s chief theater critic at the time, found the young actor “refreshingly un-self-conscious.”
Vincent Canby, also writing in The Times, praised the production’s “excellent cast, most notably (if only because he really is 16) James Van Der Beek, who plays the boy with the comic ease of someone with 20 years’ experience onstage.”
James made his film debut as a high school bully in “Angus” (1995) while still attending high school at Cheshire Academy. That same year, he appeared in the musical “Shenandoah” at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn.
In 1997, he was studying English at Drew University, in New Jersey, when he played a disturbed teenager under the care of an equally disturbed psychiatrist in Nicky Silver’s Off Broadway comedy “My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine.” He dropped out of college that year when “Dawson’s Creek” came along.
While the series was on the air, he played a high school football player in the coming-of-age movie “Varsity Blues” (1999); himself in the Kevin Smith comedy “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001); and a bitter, promiscuous, drug-dealing college student in “The Rules of Attraction” (2002), a dark comedy based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
After “Dawson’s Creek” ended, Mr. Van Der Beek was in prime-time demand — as a womanizing doctor on NBC’s “Mercy” (2010); a smart-aleck doctor on “Friends With Better Lives” (2014); an F.B.I. field agent on the spinoff “CSI: Cyber” (2015-16); a superstar D.J. in “What Would Diplo Do?” (2017); and a cocaine-snorting bad guy in the first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Pose” (2018). In all 26 episodes of “Don’t Trust the B___ in Apartment 23” (2012-13), he played a version of James Van Der Beek plagued by even more “Dawson’s Creek” fans than in real life.
His final stage appearance, in 2013, was in “The Gift” at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, about married couples at a Caribbean resort.
His last screen appearance was in “Sidelined 2: Intercepted,” a 2025 sequel to “Sidelined: The QB and Me” (2024), a sports romance comedy.
Mr. Van Der Beek married Heather McComb, an actress, in 2003. Their divorce became final in 2010, shortly before he married Kimberly Brook, a business consultant with whom he had six children. Survivors include his wife and their children, Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.
Mr. Van Der Beek spoke about his acting career in a 2013 interview with HuffPost, saying that he had learned early on to “go in and be completely open and just jump in with both feet.”
He added, “Everything you do belongs to the audience, ultimately.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post James Van Der Beek, Teenage Heartthrob of ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ Dies at 48 appeared first on New York Times.
