I spent a lot of my pre-teens angry at James Van Der Beek. On Dawson’s Creek, the treacly Nineties soap about a quartet of romantically incestuous and eerily articulate teenagers, Van Der Beek’s titular Dawson was basically Satan with an *NSYNC haircut. He was a boy chronically high off his own fumes, a whiny, virginal manipulator of fragile young women, and a bafflingly wrong-headed film bro with a poster of Steven Spielberg’s slave epic Amistad on his bedroom wall. He had an ugly cry, which I found completely hilarious long before a shot of it was immortalised as a GIF on the early internet, and I got a perverse thrill from the fact that Katie Holmes’s Joey ran off at show’s end not with him but with Joshua Jackson’s Pacey, like any smart person would.
Van Der Beek, who has died with cancer at the age of 48, never really escaped the shadow of Dawson Leery, a fact he initially seemed frustrated with, then accepting of (he’d later brilliantly mock his goofy, posturing Dawson-ness on a sitcom called Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, where he played a goofy, posturing version of himself). And it’s potentially the reason his death hits as hard as it does. Unlike, to varying degrees, his co-stars (most obviously the multiple Oscar nominee Michelle Williams, portrayer of the show’s cool, doomed Jen), Van Der Beek always felt a bit fossilised in a particular time period; an eternal teenager in dire need of being pelted with fruits and vegetables (complimentary). I still remember those rages of mine. And the feeling of sighing with exasperation at him, every Sunday morning in front of T4. It speaks to just how good he was at being the absolute worst.
