It was "weird enough," recalls James Van Der
Beek, to be tooling around Hollywood last January in a stretch limo. Just nine
months earlier, the English major at New Jersey's Drew University had put his
studies on hold to pursue a full-time acting career. Now he was en route to a
press conference to promote the popular series, Dawson's Creek, in which
Van Der Beek, 21, plays Dawson Leery, a small-town teen striving to become the
next Steven Spielberg. Glancing out the limousine window, the newcomer suddenly
beheld his own image on a billboard in all its larger-than-life glory. "I
started laughing," he says, "because I didn't know how to deal with the hype. I
keep asking myself how did Iget here?"
Credit millions of rabid teens for making Dawson's Creek a Peyton
Place for the Clearasil set, the WB's highest-rated series, and one
of the top prime-time shows among teens. Since its debut Jan. 20, the series
has even bested Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which Creek follows on
Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET). But reviews have been mixed. While many find the
characters appealing, others have complained that Dawson and his horny young
friends have an unseemly preoccupation with sex. "We get dialogue about `sex,'
`breasts' and `genitalia' in the very first scene," wrote Washington
Post TV critic Tom Shales. "Dawson's Creek is a raging stream of
hormones." Van Der Beek disagrees. "It's been adults mainly who have the
problem," he says. "No one under 20 has said, `That's too much sex; that's not
the way it really is.' "
The controversy doesn't seem to have dimmed Van Der Beek's charm. "I think
James is going to be a huge star," says Creek's creator, Kevin
Williamson, 33 (who wrote Scream
and Scream 2). "He's very
serious and single-minded about acting. But what is nice about him and the
other kids is that they're unaffected. They're not yet stars, so they're not
concerned with the size of their trailer . . . yet!"
Costar Joshua Jackson, 19, who plays Dawson's libidinous pal Pacey, says that
Van Der Beek is just as "sweet" and "earnest" as the character he plays. "He's
the good-looking, polite, college-educated kid who says `sir' and `ma'am.' "
That squeaky-clean image is no act. Jackson shared an apartment with Van Der
Beek during the show's four-month shoot in Wilmington, N.C., last fall. "People
called us the Odd Couple," says Jackson, "and I was definitely not Felix."
Perhaps Van Der Beek's proper New England upbringing accounts for his good
manners. His father, Jim, a phone company employee, and mother, Melinda, a
Broadway dancer turned gym teacher, raised James, brother Jared, 18, and sister
Juliana, 16, in Cheshire, Conn. In the eighth grade at public school, Van Der
Beek traded football for footlights after suffering a concussion trying to
catch a pass. Landing the role of Danny Zuko in a community-theater production
of Grease, he was hooked. "They dyed my hair black, and I was still a
boy soprano," he says. In 1994, Van Der Beek, by then a junior at the private
Cheshire Academy, was commuting by train into New York City after school to
rehearse for his Off-Broadway debut as a young idealist in Edward Albee's
Finding the Sun. That same year, he made his feature-film bow, playing
an arrogant jock in Angus. "[People] told me, `Oh, this is going to
catapult you.' But the movie came and went. Now people tell me the same is
going to happen with Dawson's Creek, and I take it with a grain of
salt."
