James Van Der Beek, the 'Dawson's Creek' star who later mocked his own hunky persona, has died at 48

NEW YORK (AP) — James Van Der Beek, a heartthrob who starred in coming-of-age dramas at the dawn of the new millennium, shooting to fame playing the titular character in “Dawson’s Creek” and in later years mocking his own hunky persona, has died. He was 48.

“Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning. 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,” said a statement from the actor's family posted on Instagram. “For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving 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.

He appeared projected onstage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre during a live reading of the show’s pilot episode to benefit F Cancer and Van Der Beek. Lin-Manuel Miranda subbed for him on stage.

"Thank you to every single person here,” Van Der Beek said.

A one-time theater kid, Van Der Beek would star in the movie “Varsity Blues” and on TV in “CSI: Cyber” as FBI Special Agent Elijah Mundo, but was forever connected to “Dawson’s Creek,” which ran from 1998 to 2003 on The WB.

The series followed a group of high school friends as they learned about falling in love, creating real friendships and finding their footing in life. Van Der Beek, then 20, played 15-year-old Dawson Leery, who aspired to be a director of Steven Spielberg quality.

With Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want To Wait,” as its moody theme song, “Dawson's Creek” helped define The WB as a haven for teens and young adults who related to its hyper-articulate dialogue and frank talk about sexuality. And it made household names of Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson.

“While James' legacy will always live on, this is a huge loss to not just your family but the world,” Sarah Michelle Gellar wrote to his widow on Instagram. Katharine McPhee Foster added: “This is just beyond devastating news.” Others posting messages of mourning were Jenna Dewan and Olivia Munn.

The show caused a stir when one of the teens embarked on a racy affair with a teacher 20 years his senior and when Holmes' character climbed through Dawson's bedroom window and they curled up together. Racier shows like “Euphoria” and “Sex Education” owe a debt to “Dawson's Creek.”

Van Der Beek sometimes struggled to get out from under the shadow of the show but eventually leaned into lampooning himself, like on Funny Or Die videos and on Kesha's “Blow” music video, which included his laser gun battle with the pop star in a nightclub and dead unicorns.

“It’s tough to compete with something that was the cultural phenomenon that ‘Dawson’s Creek’ was,” he told Vulture in 2013. “It ran for so long. That’s a lot of hours playing one character in front of people. So it’s natural that they associate you with that.”

More than a decade after the show went off the air, a scene at the end of the show’s third season became a GIF. Dawson was watching as his soul mate embarks on a love affair with his best friend and burst into tears.

“It wasn’t scripted that I was supposed to cry; it was just one of those things where it’s a magical moment and it just happens in the scene,” Van Der Beek told Vanity Fair. He seemed exasperated when he told the Los Angeles Times: “All of a sudden, six years of work was boiled down to one seven-second clip on loop.” (Van Der Beek himself recreated the GIF in 2011 for Funny or Die and gave it a second life.)

While still on “Dawson’s Creek,” Van Der Beek hosted “Saturday Night Live” — the musical guest was Everlast — and landed a plumb role in “Varsity Blues,” playing a second-string high school quarterback who leaps into the breach when the star suffers an injury.

Van Der Beek’s character, Mox, turns out to not be a football fanatic, preferring to read Kurt Vonnegut and yearning for the college education that will allow him to escape the jock mentality of his Texas town.

“I don’t want your life,” he screams at one point. Critic Roger Ebert called him “convincing and likable.”

Some of his projects after “Dawson’s Creek” included co-creating and playing Wesley “Diplo” Pentz, a dull but likable music producer in the mockumentary satire on Viceland, “What Would Diplo Do?” In 2019, he made it to the semifinals of ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” and played a balding, out-of-shape ex-boyfriend on “How I Met Your Mother.”

“The more you make fun of yourself and don’t try to go for 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 a leading man’s body.”

Between 2003 and 2013, he made appearances in shows like “Criminal Minds,” “One Tree Hill,” and “How I Met Your Mother.” He played himself with a crackpot intensity in the Krysten Ritter-led ABC drama “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23,” and the short-lived “CSI” spinoff “CSI: Cyber” and CBS’ “Friends With Better Lives.”

He’s also appeared in movies such as Kevin Smith’s 2001 comedy “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and its 2019 sequel, “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.” He was in the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation of “The Rules of Attraction” in 2002 opposite 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 was raised in Cheshire, Connecticut, started acting at 13 after suffering a concussion playing football that prevented him from playing for a year. He landed the role of Danny Zuko in his school production of “Grease.”

He stuck with theater, landing at 16 in 1994 an off-Broadway role in “Finding the Sun” by Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee and one of the sons in a revival of “Shenandoah” at the prestigious Goodspeed Opera House in his home state.

He earned a scholarship to New Jersey’s Drew University 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 the mission of Drew,” the university said.

Drew University President Hilary Link welcomed Van Der Beek with a popular quote from his “Dawson’s Creek” character: “Edge is fleeting,” she said, “but heart lasts forever. So on 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.

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman contributed to this report.

FILE - James Van Der Beek attends the Broadway opening night of "Girl From The North Country" in New York on March 5, 2020. (Photo by Greg Allen/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - James Van Der Beek arrives at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2019. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - James Van Der Beek attends the premiere of "The Words" in Los Angeles on Sept. 4, 2012. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Actors Ali Larter, left, poses with co-stars James Van Der Beek, center, and Amy Smart at the premiere of "Varsity Blues" in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, 1999. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

FILE - James Van Der Beek attends the FOX Winter Press Day in Los Angeles on Nov. 18, 2024. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

The British Nigerian director Akinola Davies Jr. and his brother Wale were both toddlers when their father died. As adults, they could hardly remember him. Then Wale had an idea for movie. What if, by some movie miracle, they had gotten to spend a day with their dad?

In “My Father’s Shadow,” the Davies brothers pay tribute to him in a shattering father-son tale set across such a day in Nigeria. The film, Akinola's directing debut, has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed films of the past year, making history at the Cannes Film Festival and winning awards around the world.

A powerfully autobiographic work resonate with memory and loss, “My Father's Shadow” is the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of the Davies' brothers wondering. Wale first sent Akinola a script in 2012. Wale had never before written a movie script; Akinola had never read one.

“With zero context, he sent it to me and I just had this real emotional reaction,” Akinola Davies said in an interview at last year in Cannes. “I actually cried when I read it because I had never conceived of the idea of spending a day with my father and what we would say to him and what he would be like.”

In the film, set over a single day in Lagos in 1993, “Gangs of London” actor Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù plays the father, Folarin. At the family’s home outside Lagos, the young brothers (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) return home to unexpectedly find him inside. They hardly ever see him — he works in Lagos — but Folarin takes them along on a trip in the city that will be revelatory for the boys.

It's set on a pivotal day for Nigeria, when democracy is hanging in the balance. Having taken power in a coup, Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida refuses to accept the results of a democratic election. “My Father's Shadow” evolves as not just a conjured portrait of Davies' father, but of a national moment of hope. In both cases, the dream is fleeting.

At its Cannes debut last May, “My Father’s Shadow” made history. It was the first Nigerian film in the festival's official selection, a milestone that Nigeria, a country with its own large film industry, nicknamed Nollywood, celebrated with a new presence at the global cinema gathering.

“It means a lot to people back in Nigeria. It means we can exist on these platforms and our stories can exist in these spaces,” said Davies. “It’s a testament to talent that’s around in Nigeria. It’s a testament to the stories that are there. It’s a testament to the industry that’s flourishing.”

“My Father’s Shadow,” which Mubi releases in North American theaters Friday, is a British-Nigerian production that the U.K. selected for its Oscar submission. It received 12 nominations from the British Independent Film Awards. Davies, who lives in London, is also nominated for best British debut by the BAFTAs. At the Gotham Awards in New York, Davies won breakthrough director and Dìrísù won outstanding lead performance.

By any measure, it's a remarkable distance for a movie made independently in Nigeria to go.

“The Nigerian press asks me a lot if the film is Nollywood or not Nollywood. I would say it is because all the technicians work in Nollywood,” said Davies. “You can’t borrow people from that whole industry and say it’s not part of it.”

Shot in Lagos, “My Father's Shadow” gets a tremendous amount of its texture and atmosphere from Nigeria. “Point a camera at anything in Lagos, and it’s so cinematic,” Davies says.

“I have this real sense of romance for Nigeria,” he adds. “Everyone’s like, ‘It’s super chaotic,’ but for me it’s actually very still. Just driving around in the car feels really cinematic to me. I just take pictures of people all the time.”

When Akinola was 20 months old and Wale was 4 years old, their father rapidly developed epilepsy and died during a seizure while lying in bed next to their mother. To create the fictional version of their father, the Davies brothers tried to remember what they could. They tried to separate their real memories from their imagined ones.

“It’s kind of the confluence of memory, dream and hearsay,” says Davies, whose named after his dad. “How do you work through all of that to create a portrait?”

“My Father’s Shadow” represents the realization of Davies’ filmmaking aspirations. His BAFTA-nominated short “Lizard” got him on the radar in Britain's film industry. But “My Father's Shadow” has firmly established him as a major up-and-coming director.

Yet for Davies, all the accolades don't come close to what the movie has meant for him and his family.

“Being the age I am, I’ve done my grieving,” Davies says. “But just before we shot, I realized I was still grieving. Our prep started about a week after the anniversary of my dad’s passing. Every year, my mum calls me or texts me. I took my brother to his grave, put flowers down and made kind of a ceremony out of it.”

This story first moved May 19, 2025. It was resent on Feb. 11, 2025, ahead of the movie’s release in North America.

FILE - Sope Dirisu, star of the film "My Father's Shadow," left, poses with director Akinola Davies Jr. at the 78th international film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File)

Writer Wale Davies, from left, producer Funmbi Ogunbanwo and director Akinola Davies Jr. pose for photographers upon arrival at the screening of the film "My Father's Shadow" on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, in London. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP)

FILE - Akinola Davies Jr., director of the film "My Father's Shadow," poses at the 78th international film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Sope Dirisu, star of the film "My Father's Shadow" poses with director Akinola Davies Jr. at the 78th international film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File)