ARTICLES
JAMES VAN DER BEEK
CREEK GOD People: weekly, March 23rd issue
It was "weird enough," recalls James Van Der Beek, to be tooling
around Hollywood last January in a stretch limo. Just nine
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 it's debut Jan.20, the series has even bested Buffy
the Vampire Slayer (which Creek
follows on Tuesday at 9p.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 mainly adults who have the problem," he says. "No one
under 20 has said, 'That's too much sex; that's not the way it realy 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 his acting. But what is nice about him and the
other kids is that they are 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 the Van Der
Beek is just a "sweet" and "earnest" as the character he
plays. "He's the good-looking, polite, college-educated kid who says 'si'
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 definitly not Felix."
Perhaps Van Der Beek's proper New Englad 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 concusion trying to catch
a pass. Landing the role of Danny Zuko in a commmunity-theater production of Grease,
he was hooked. "They dyed my hair black and I was still a 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 filmbow, 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."
In
fact, he almost botched his L.A. audition last April. "He was realy
nervous, and it showed," says Williamson, who calmed his protégé down
with a pep talk. "Then he came back into the room and stunned us. We knew
he was Dawson. He's very bright, but he's also very vulnerable. I like that,
because that keeps him 15 years old."
It's
a quality that Van Der Beek, who's currently not dating, projects offscreen as
well. "I've met some cool people in L.A.," he says. "They took me
around and showed me the whole Hollywood scene." Among his discoveries?
"I saw people wearing sunglasses at night! I always thought that was a
joke, but they realy do it!" ¤Michael A. Lipton ¤Paula Yoo
in Los Angeles