James Van Der Beek, a heartthrob who starred in coming-of-age dramas at the dawn of the new millennium, rose to fame playing the title character on Dawson’s Creek and in later years poking fun at his own handsome personality, has died. He was 48 years old. “Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed away peacefully this morning. He faced his final days with courage, faith and grace. There is much to share about his wishes, his love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come,” said a statement from the actor’s family posted on Instagram.
“For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we mourn our beloved husband, father, son, brother and friend.” Van Der Beek revealed in 2024 that he was being treated for colorectal cancer. Van Der Beek made a surprise video appearance in September at a Dawson’s Creek reunion charity event in New York City after previously dropping out due to illness. It appeared projected on stage at the Richard Rodgers Theater during a live reading of the show’s pilot episode to benefit F Cancer and Van Der Beek. Lin-Manuel Miranda replaced him on stage. “Thank you to every person here,” Van Der Beek said.
Van Der Beek, once a theater kid, would star in the film Varsity Blues and on television in CSI: Cyber as FBI Special Agent Elijah Mundo, but he was forever connected to “Dawson’s Creek,” which aired from 1998 to 2003 on The WB. The series followed a group of high school friends as they learned to fall in love, create real friendships, and find their balance in life. Van Der Beek, then 20 years old, played 15-year-old Dawson Leery, who aspired to be a director of the caliber of Steven Spielberg. With Paula Cole’s I Don’t Want To Wait as its melancholic theme, Dawson’s Creek helped define The WB as a haven for teens and young adults who identified with its hyper-articulate dialogue and frank conversations about sexuality. And it made Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson famous.
“While James’ legacy will always live on, this is a great loss not only for his family but for the world,” Sarah Michelle Gellar wrote to his widow on Instagram. Katharine McPhee Foster added: “This is beyond devastating news.” Others who posted messages of mourning were Jenna Dewan and Olivia Munn. The show caused a stir when one of the teenagers embarked on a racist affair with a teacher 20 years his senior and when Holmes’ character climbed through Dawson’s bedroom window and they snuggled together.
Racier shows like Euphoria and Sex Education owe a debt to Dawson’s Creek. Van Der Beek sometimes struggled to emerge from the show’s shadow, but ultimately leaned toward satirizing himself, as in the Funny Or Die videos and Kesha’s ‘Blow’ music video, which featured her laser gun shootout with the pop star in a nightclub and dead unicorns. “It’s hard to compete with something that was the cultural phenomenon that was ‘Dawson’s Creek,'” he told Vulture in 2013. “It was on for so long. It’s a lot of hours playing a character in front of people. So it’s natural that you’re associated with that.”
More than a decade after the show went off the air, a scene at the end of the show’s third season was turned into a GIF. Dawson was watching his soulmate embark on a love story with his best friend and burst into tears. “It wasn’t in the script that I was supposed to cry; it was just one of those things where it’s a magical moment and it just happened in the scene,” Van Der Beek told Vanity Fair. He seemed exasperated when he told the Los Angeles Times: “Suddenly, six years of work was reduced to a seven-second clip on a loop.” (Van Der Beek himself recreated the GIF in 2011 for Funny or Die and gave it a second life.)
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While still on Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek hosted Saturday Night Live (the musical guest was Everlast) and landed a featured role on Varsity Blues, playing a high school backup quarterback who steps into the breach when the star suffers an injury. Van Der Beek’s character, Mox, turns out not to be a football fan, preferring to read Kurt Vonnegut and years of college education that will allow him to escape the sports mentality of his Texas town. “I don’t want your life,” he shouts at one point. Critic Roger Ebert called it “compelling and likeable.”
After ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ some of his post-Dawson’s Creek projects included co-creating and starring as Wesley “Diplo” Pentz, a boring but likable music producer, in the satirical mockumentary about Viceland, “What Would Diplo Do?” In 2019, he reached the semifinals of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and played a bald, out-of-shape ex-boyfriend on How I Met Your Mother. “The more you make fun of yourself and don’t try to seek any kind of respect, the more people seem to respect you,” he told Vanity Fair in 2011. “I’ve always been a clown trapped in the body of a protagonist.”
Between 2003 and 2013, he appeared on shows such as Criminal Minds, One Tree Hill, and How I Met Your Mother. He played himself with kooky intensity on the Krysten Ritter-directed ABC drama Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 and on the short-lived CSI spinoff CSI: Cyber and CBS’s Friends With Better Lives. He also appeared in films such as the 2001 Kevin Smith comedy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and its 2019 sequel, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.
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He was in Bret Easton Ellis’ adaptation of The Rules of Attraction in 2002 alongside Jessica Biel and Kate Bosworth. In 2025, he was unmasked as Griffin on The Masked Singer after singing a cover of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads and I Had Some Help by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen.
Van Der Beek, who grew up in Cheshire, Connecticut, began acting at age 13 after suffering a concussion playing soccer that prevented him from playing for a year. He landed the role of Danny Zuko in the school production of Grease. He continued with theater, landing at age 16 in 1994 an off-Broadway role in Finding the Sun, by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee, and one of the children in a revival of Shenandoah at the prestigious Goodspeed Opera in his home state.
He earned a scholarship to Drew University in New Jersey, but left school early when he was cast in Dawson’s Creek. In 2024, he returned to campus to accept an honorary degree for his “selfless service and exemplary commitment to Drew’s mission,” the university said. Drew University President Hilary Link welcomed Van Der Beek with a popular quote from her Dawson’s Creek character: “The limit is fleeting, but the heart lasts forever. So this morning we pay tribute to that heart.” He is survived by his wife, Kimberly, and six children, Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.