James Van Der Beek, the charismatic actor who starred as the sensitive and insecure Dawson Leery on The WB teen melodrama Dawson’s Creek, lost his battle with colorectal cancer on Wednesday. He was 48.
“Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning,” his wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, said in a statement. “He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace. There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come. For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and friend.”
The father of six kids, Van Der Beek announced in November 2024 that he had “been privately dealing with this diagnosis” — it was Stage 3 — since August 2023.
During two summer hiatuses from his hit series, Van Der Beek starred as the principled Texas high school quarterback Jonathan “Mox” Moxon in the Brian Robbins-helmed Varsity Blues (1999) and as the hedonistic Sean Bateman in the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Rules of Attraction (2002), written and directed by Roger Avary.
The good-natured Connecticut native also played versions of himself in 2001’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (in the movie within the movie) and in 2019’s Jay & Silent Bob Reboot and for two seasons of the 2012-13 ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, where he had the self-assurance to portray an actor on the decline. (See photos of his most memorable roles.)
Van Der Beek had been directed by Edward Albee on a New York stage and had played a bully in the coming-of-age film Angus (1995) when he was hired as a Steven Spielberg wannabe on Dawson’s Creek, created by Kevin Williamson for Columbia TriStar Television. (He was 20 portraying a 15-year-old.)
Set in the fictional town of Capeside, Massachusetts, the show premiered as a midseason replacement on Jan. 20, 1998, and ran for six seasons — the first four are set at Capeside High, freshman through senior years — through May 14, 2003.
Van Der Beek appeared on every one of the 128 episodes, as did Katie Holmes as Dawson’s best friend and love interest, Joey Potter. With Joshua Jackson as another pal, Pacey Witter, and Michelle Williams as next-door neighbor Jen Lindley, a transplanted New Yorker, they grew up together on the show.
“These characters speak very honestly about everything that 15-year-olds are waking up and dealing with every day — relationships, the opposite sex, parents, school, dreams, aspirations,” he said during a 1998 appearance on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.
The show was wildly popular with younger viewers, girls in particular.
Throughout its run, there was always a “Will they or won’t they?” dynamic surrounding Dawson and Joey. In the end, it turns out it’s Joey and Pacey who get together, and that’s OK.
“For the first time in a long time, my life is real. Doesn’t matter who ends up with who; in some unearthly way, it’s always going to be you and me,” Dawson tells Joey during the series’ poignant final scene. “What we have goes beyond friendship, beyond lovers. It’s forever.”
The oldest of three kids, Van Der Beek was born on March 8, 1977, in Cheshire, Connecticut, a bucolic town of white picket fences, not unlike Capeside.
His father, Jim, pitched with the Albuquerque Dukes, then the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate, before working for decades as a telephone executive. His mother, Melinda, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, danced on Broadway and ran her own gymnastics tumbling school in Cheshire for 27 years.
“In eighth grade, we were asked to write a letter to ourselves about where we would be in five years,” he said in an interview with Teen Machine. “I wrote that I either wanted to be a pro baseball player like my father or I wanted to be a physical therapist. Acting wasn’t anywhere near my mind.”
After he was banned from playing football in junior high for a year because of a concussion, he turned to acting and was cast as Danny Zuko in a community theater production of Grease.
When he was 15 and attending the prestigious Cheshire Academy prep school as a do-no-wrong student on a scholarship, he got his mom to take him to Manhattan to secure representation — and landed an agent and manager on his first trip.
Still, it took about a half and a half of auditioning without success — that included making six-hour trips back and forth between Cheshire and New York — before he was cast as a drummer on a December 1993 episode of Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All.
A few months later, Van Der Beek played a swimmer in an off-Broadway production of Albee’s Finding the Sun, with The New York Times in its review calling him “refreshingly un-self-conscious as a teenager yet to suffer the inevitable ‘tarnish’.”
Still in high school, he made his film debut in Angus, then appeared as another aggressive kid in the romantic drama I Love You, I Love You Not (1996).
He attended Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, as an English major and sang in an all-male a cappella group called 36 Madison Avenue but quit college when Dawson’s Creek came calling.
After the series was rejected by NBC and Fox, the three-year-old WB gave it a green light, and shooting began in Wilmington, North Carolina. Holmes, Jackson and Williams had all been cast before Van Der Beek was.
Fame came quickly, and it was overwhelming. “I went from signing my first autograph in 1998 to, literally two weeks later, being rushed by an angry, screaming mob of teenage girls — girls getting crushed against barricades and [me] being shoved in the back of a cop car to escape the melee,” he told Vulture in 2013.
Also in 1998, he was named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World.”
Not wanting to be typecast as “a vulnerable guy,” Van Der Beek auditioned for the part of Mox in Varsity Blues to learn from co-star Jon Voight and play “someone really different than Dawson,” he said. “It’s not a movie about winning the big game. It deals with rebellion and standing up to authority figures when they are abusing their power.”
He went a step further with The Rules of Attraction, playing the lustful younger brother of American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman.
With the end of Dawson’s Creek, he quickly returned to the theater, appearing off-Broadway in Rain Dance, a 2003 drama about four people (Randolph Mantooth, Harris Yulin and Suzanne Regan play the others) involved with the making of the atomic bomb in 1945.
In 2008-09, Van Der Beek recurred as movie director Adam Reese on The CW’s One Tree Hill, then took his first regular series role since Dawson’s Creek in 2010, playing the head of the ICU on the NBC medical drama Mercy (the show lasted one season).
After Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, he recurred as one of Robin Scherbatsky’s (Cobie Smulders) early boyfriends in How I Met Your Mother from 2008-13 and played a divorced gynecologist on another CBS sitcom, Friends With Better Lives, in 2014.
From there, he was a weaponry forensics expert for two seasons (2015-16) on the CBS’ spinoff CSI: Cyber; co-created the 2017 Viceland show What Would Diplo Do?, also playing the titular DJ; played a vengeful boss on the FX drama Pose in 2018; and voiced the co-owner of the Scare B&B on the 2017-21 Disney Jr. series Vampirina.
Along the way, he had a funny cameo in Scary Movie (2000) and appeared in such other films as Harvest (2001), Texas Rangers (2001), Standing Still (2005), Formosa Betrayed (2009), The Big Bang (2010), Backwards (2012), Jason Reitman’s Labor Day (2013), Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017) and Bad Hair (2020).
He competed on Dancing With the Stars in 2018 and The Masked Singer last year.
It was announced in May that he would recur in Elle, a Legally Blonde prequel set up at Prime Video. The show, which got an early season two renewal last month, is set to premiere in July.
In addition to his father and Kimberly, whom he married in August 2010, survivors include their children, Olivia, 15; Joshua, 13; Annabel, 12; Emilia, 9; Gwendolyn, 6; and Jeremiah, 4; his brother, Jared; and his sister, Juliana.
His first wife was actress Heather McComb (Profiler, Party of Five); they were married from 2003 until their 2009 divorce.
The family has set up a GoFundMe to help with expenses following his cancer battle: “The costs of James’s medical care and the extended fight against cancer have left the family out of funds. They are working hard to stay in their home and to ensure the children can continue their education and maintain some stability during this incredibly difficult time. The support of friends, family, and the wider community will make a world of difference as they navigate the road ahead.”
In December 2024, Van Der Beek, Anthony Anderson and NFL players Taye Diggs and Chris Jones were among those stripping to raise awareness for prostate, testicular and colorectal cancer testing in the Fox special The Real Full Monty.
He was all set to appear in September at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York to participate in a live reading of the Dawson’s Creek pilot script with Holmes, Williams, Jackson, Mary Beth Peil, Busy Philipps and other castmembers in a benefit for the nonprofit F Cancer organization.
However, he couldn’t make it from his home in Austin, citing “two stomach viruses” as the reason.
“Despite every effort … I won’t get to be there,” he wrote on Instagram. “I won’t get to stand on that stage and thank every soul in the theater for showing up for me, and against cancer, when I needed it most.” Looking gaunt, he also recorded a video that played to cheers in the theater.
His wife and kids were there, however, and everyone lined up to sing the Dawson’s Creek theme song, Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait.”