Dawson Leery is the TV character that no one will let James Van Der Beek forget. The teen drama he moped about in for seven series is nearly 20 years old, and his career has been on a curious trajectory ever since, but still the possibility of a Capeside reunion is all that anyone wants to ask him about. And so Van Der Beek begins our conversation by bringing it up before we’ve even ordered coffee. “That’s the question that comes at the end of every interview,” he tells me. “Somebody says, ‘OK now, I apologise, you know I have to ask…’”
Well, seeing as he mentioned it, would he indulge the show’s many fans – one of whom is absolutely not sitting opposite him in a hotel bar this morning and totally did not spend a lot of her early teens imagining that one day she’d fall for someone who spoke in impossibly long monologues – with Dawson’s Creek The Movie? Is there a Netflix-enabled future in which Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and he would play midlife versions of their former breakout roles?
Inevitably, the answer is a sighed no. “Some characters live with you for a while and you wonder how they’re doing and what they’d be doing now,” he offers. “I felt pretty complete putting that one on the shelf and not looking at him again.”
But the show’s theme tune still haunts him. “I have a complicated relationship with that song,” he says (for the uninitiated, it’s Paula Cole’s breathlessly irritating I Don’t Want To Wait). “If I was at karaoke and it started playing there’s a part of me – and I’m a fucking grown-ass man with four kids – that still wants to go hide under the table. I was at a pharmacy in Philadelphia and it came on and I immediately went into a weird panic. I think it’s tied to the pandemonium that accompanied that, for which there was no off button. Walking around at that time was very tricky because one autograph could turn into a mob scene. So I walked around,” he laughs, “in fear of teenage girls.”
No wonder he doesn’t want to resurrect Dawson. But it might also be because, while his wannabe film-maker may have been the poster-boy for sensitive teen romanticism in the late 90s, the character was astonishingly wet. The internet agrees, and in 2011 volunteered some shorthand by way of a two-second gif of Dawson mid-cry, lifted from an episode where he is dumped by long-standing crush Joey. The meme still makes him chuckle. He has a mischievous titter – at odds with his off-duty 50s film-star outfit of tweed trousers and cream shawl cardigan.
Kickstarted by Ugly Cry Face, he’s currently riding a second wave as a meta-star. There’s been a cameo in a Kesha music video, skits for the comedy website Funny Or Die – including one, “Vandermemes”, where he owns the Ugly Cry Face phenomenon by demonstrating more “intense emotional closeups” – and a role as himself in the TV comedy Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Very soon he will be parodying superstar DJ Diplo in upcoming Vice series What Would Diplo Do?
His leap into comedy acting came after his big TV comeback show, NBC medical drama Mercy, was cancelled. “I was 33, I had my first kid, and I thought: OK, what doors are open right now?” he says. “And I was thinking, I’m having more fun doing this [comedy] than I would crying every day!”
Apartment 23 sounds in many ways like a bizarre kind of therapy. “It [was] great to go in and obliterate any shards of ego or self-preservation that may have been left,” says Van Der Beek of what it was like to play an inflated version of himself. “Any preciousness, any label that you’re fighting for or hoping to preserve – it’s the death of any interesting or worthwhile expression.”
In the 14 years since Dawson’s Creek ended, Van der Beek has taken all sorts of roles in mainly short-lived sitcoms, including Friends With Better Lives, made by the people behind Friends and Frazier. When that was pulled after eight episodes he took a role in police procedural CSI: Cyber but it was “a desert for me, creatively. There’s a lot of standing around and laying expositional pipe.”
You can see why he was drawn to his current role as an obnoxious tech entrepreneur in Sky comedy Carters Get Rich, in which his character appears out of a briefcase as a hologram, kimono-clad and dancing to 90s house music. But it’s while discussing What Would Diplo Do? that his blue eyes light up. It’s his first time as star and showrunner: “What we pitched was parables through the eyes of a clown: EDM Jesus Sucks at Life!”
The show started life as a video promo for one of Diplo’s live tours but soon spiralled into a scripted comedy miniseries. Van Der Beek hired writers – including, in an ironic twist, Hal Oszan, who played Dawson’s odious director-mentor Todd Carr back in the Creek – and they set about storyboarding the exaggerated world of Diplo (aka Wes Pentz). “Every episode we would try and figure out: what is a universal truth about life, about ego, about relationships, or self-preservation? We’d write high-minded nonsense on the whiteboard and then layer ridiculousness on top. So the idea is that fake Diplo is able to channel philosophical wisdom at the same rate as he channels the right hook and the right beat. And he gets to ride a horse!”
Pentz was onboard from the get-go and, according to Van Der Beek, not taking himself too seriously either. “When I was first very famous and people were passing out and all that, I remember watching a Beatles documentary and George saying how people were looking for any excuse to go mad. That’s the first thing I heard that made sense about any of this. People say “I love you!”, but they don’t love me, I’m saying somebody else’s words. I’m wearing makeup for God’s sakes! They’re loving some representation.”
And it’s the same with club culture. “People really want to be moved, they want to throw their hands in the air. Music catches the edge of something metaphysical and these DJs – the good ones – are sensitive to that. We make a joke in the show about how they’re modern-day shamen.” And has any of that superstar DJ shine stuck? “I’d like to think so,” he smirks. “The crotch in the sweatpants that I wear has dropped an inch or two.”
- Carters Get Rich finishes on Sky Atlantic on Sunday
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