Film Review, by Roald Rynning
June 1999
Rules of the Game
With a movie career down the dumper, James Van Der Beek struck gold with the teen TV Drama Dawson's Creek... which gave him another shot at movie fame in the smash Varsity Blues Twenty-one-year-old James Van Der Beek is the hottest teen idol in America, where his sensitive portrayal of Dawson Leery in Dawson's Creek has made him the cover star of every youth magazine. While most TV stars struggle to break into films, James' first try- the football drama Varsity Blues- opened at number one US box-office receipts of 17 million dollars and went on to gross over 50 million. Now the charming heart throb is mobbed wherever he appears in public and is struggling with his new-found fame.
"Getting recognized was fun for three minutes," he says. "Now it's scary. Dawson's Creek has become so popular that we have to have tight security at the studio in North Carolina where we're filming."
From the quiet town of Cheshire, Connecticut, James begun his career as Danny Zukko in a community production of Grease. He then persuaded his mother to take him to auditions in New York. His first break was in an off-Broadway production of Edward albee's Finding the Sun. Two years later, at 18, he won the role of a bully in the film Angus.
"Everybody told me Angus would propel me into stardom," recalls Van Der Beek of his first film. "Then it bombed."
He had a small role in I Love You...I Love You Not with Claire Danes, but soon his career had fizzled.
"I hit a dry spell. I was frustrated, I was auditioning badly, and I was burnt out. So I just said, 'Screw it'."
He enrolled at Drew University in New Jersey, where he majored in English. Finally getting back into the auditioning grind, he won the role in Dawson's Creek. The series was an overnight sensation.
In Brian Robbins's Varsity Blues, Van Der Beek certainly gets to show his tougher side. He plays Jonathan Moxon, a Texas high school quarterback who leads his football team in a rebellion against their iron-fisted coach (Jon Voight).
For the role, James wanted to act and look 'radically different' from Dawson, so he cut and dyed his hair and gained 15 pounds in muscles (then he had to shed it as soon as the film finished shooting so he could get back to being an unbuffed Dawson).
"Varsity Blues is a movie about questioning the society in which you're living and looking around and saying, 'This isn't right, this has got to change.' And I really love that aspect of it. This guy I play is not a rebel without a cause."
Working with Oscar-winner Jon Voight was, according to James, "like taking a master class. There's no better situation for a young actor than to be able to work with somebody like Jon. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do the movie, to be able to work with someone of his calibre, someone with that wealth of experience."
Arriving in Austin, Texas, before the filming started, James was put into training to make sure he could play football at the required level. "We all just kind of bonded," he says of the relationship between himself, co-stars Scott Caan (son of James), Paul Walker, and the football players hired to give the film a realistic feel. "These good-old Texas boys took us out on the town and drank us under the table and kicked our asses all over the field the next day and had no qualms about it. They were really unimpressed by my sensitive portrayal of Dawson Leery and they were not about to give me any more credit than I was due, which I absolutely appreciated. So, we all got along great."