James Van Der Beek, the actor best known for his role on 1990’s TV show Dawson’s Creek, has died. He was 48.
In an email to CBC News, the actor’s publicist confirmed his death.
Van Der Beek announced in November 2024 he was diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. Since then, he had been chronicling his life with cancer and frequently speaking of his family life on Instagram.
A statement posted on the actor’s official Instagram page Wednesday said he died earlier in the day.
“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,” a statement from the actor’s family that was posted on Instagram said.
“For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and friend.”
A one-time theatre kid, Van Der Beek would go on to 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 high school group of 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. Dawson’s Creek, which used Paula Cole’s I Don’t Want To Wait as its moody theme song, helped define the WB as a haven for teens and young adults who related to its hyper-articulate dialogue and frank talk about sexuality.
The show made household names of Van Der Beek, Joshua Jackson, Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams.
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’s character climbed through Dawson’s bedroom window and they curled up together.
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 singer Kesha’s Blow music video, which included a 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. It was of Dawson, watching as his soulmate embarked on a love affair with his best friend, and bursting 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,” he told Vanity Fair.
While still on Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live 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 which 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.”
Life after Dawson
Some of his projects after Dawson’s Creek include 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 and One Tree Hill. 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’s Friends With Better Lives.
He also appeared in a number of movies, such as Kevin Smith’s 2001 comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and its 2019 sequel, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. He also 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.
Theatre kid
Van Der Beek, who was raised in Cheshire, Conn., started acting at 13 after suffering a concussion playing football that prevented him from playing for a year on doctor’s orders. He landed the role of Danny Zuko in his school production of Grease.
He stuck with theater and earned a scholarship to New Jersey’s Drew University, but left school early when he got the role 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.
Van Der Beek is survived by his wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, and six children, Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.
