A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Actor James Van Der Beek was known for starring in the hit show "Dawson's Creek" in the '90s and early aughts.
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MARTÍNEZ: Van Der Beek played aspiring filmmaker Dawson Leery, and Katie Holmes played his best friend.
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KATIE HOLMES: (As Joey Potter) We're changing. And we have to adjust or else the male-female thing will get in the way.
JAMES VAN DER BEEK: (As Dawson Leery) The male - what is it with this when Harry met '80s crap? Doesn't apply to us. We transcend it.
MARTÍNEZ: Van Der Beek died Wednesday at 48. He announced he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2024. NPR critic Linda Holmes is here with us to remember him. Linda, so let's start with his most famous character, Dawson Leery. Dawson was a high school sophomore when Van Der Beek played him in 1998. What was it about this character, Dawson, that pulled so many people in?
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Well, you know, the show started, like you said, in 1998. It was part of this wave of nighttime dramas with young ensemble casts, whether it was "90210" or, you know, "Party Of Five" or "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." And those shows were very successful. There were a lot of them. "Dawson's Creek" was sort of the more self-consciously erudite version. These high school kids used a lot of complicated vocabulary, didn't really sound like they were in high school.
And Dawson was this dreamer. As you mentioned, he wanted to be a filmmaker. He idolized Spielberg. And his best friend, Katie Holmes, as you heard, was madly in love with him. And he was oblivious. He was wild about the new girl in town, who was played by a young Michelle Williams. So it was a very classic blonde and brunette love triangle set up and very high drama, very big feelings.
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VAN DER BEEK: (As Dawson Leery) I've known you forever, but I feel like I'm seeing you for the first time tonight.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, bringing back all the feels, Linda.
HOLMES: Oh, so many feelings.
MARTÍNEZ: All the feels all over - yeah. So where did his career go from there?
HOLMES: Well, the show got very, very popular. The big effort to launch him in movies was a 1999 high school football movie called "Varsity Blues," which still has a lot of people who really like it as part of the kind of sports movie canon.
MARTÍNEZ: Count me in on that one. Yep, yep.
HOLMES: Absolutely. And he went on to do some other movies. He played a drug dealer in a movie called "The Rules Of Attraction." But I think the biggest next thing for him was a bit later in 2012 when he had a supporting role in an ABC sitcom called "Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23." And in that, he played a version of himself, himself as an insecure, pompous Hollywood actor. He was very funny in it. And I think it made people understand that he was a good comic actor and that he had a sense of humor about himself, which is very endearing and tends to, I find, lengthen people's careers.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, for him, sure did. Now, the thing is, though, getting famous young is difficult - can be, at least. Van Der Beek, though, seemed to be a pretty good sport about it.
HOLMES: He absolutely did. There was a scene in "Dawson's Creek" that became kind of famous where he had his heart broken, and he kind of ugly cried.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
HOLMES: A little clip of it became an image people would use on the internet to represent outsized sadness. But it was a serious and earnest moment that became a joke, which I'm sure can be an awkward thing for an actor. But years later, he did a video about it on the comedy site Funny Or Die called "Vandermemes."
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VAN DER BEEK: Yep, that's me on "Dawson's Creek" in a scene with Katie Holmes where her character dumps mine. You know, the more I saw it in website comment sections mocking the sadness of others, the more I realized what the internet was really demanding - more intense, emotional close-ups of my face.
HOLMES: Yeah, so the joke was this site to, you know, get new memes of him making all kinds of faces. It's very funny, and I think it's the way you take control of a situation like that. He worked steadily for the rest of his life, had guest spots on a couple of "Law & Order" shows, "Modern Family." And to me, you know, one lesson of his career is maybe that if you become an icon, that's going to stick with you, so you have to embrace it and make the best of it, because you're not going to outrun it.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. (Imitating Southern accent) I don't want your life.
HOLMES: (Imitating Southern accent) I don't want your life.
MARTÍNEZ: That's the line from "Varsity Blues" that he told his dad, yeah. That's Linda Holmes. She hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. Linda, thanks a lot.
HOLMES: Thank you.
MARTÍNEZ: James Van Der Beek is survived by his wife and six children. He was 48. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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