Hunky James Van Der Beek dives into Dawson's Creek 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."
In fact, he almost botched his L.A. audition last April. "He was really nervous,
and it showed," says Williamson, who calmed his prot?g? 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 really do it!"
-- MICHAEL A. LIPTON
-- PAULA YOO in Los Angeles