James van der Beek

It could be said that fate played a hand in James Van Der Beek's entrance into the acting world, when at the age of thirteen he suffered a mild concussion which prevented him from playing football for the rest of the year. Finding himself on the sidelines, he decided to try out for the school play and landed the lead role of Danny Zuko in "Grease." James was hooked and he wasted no time in joining the community theatre group in his home town of Cheshire, where he grew up with fellow siblings, brother Jared and sister Juliana.
Sixteen and still focused on pursuing an acting career, his mother, Melinda, agreed one summer to travel the three hours each way to New York City in order for him to pursue acting professionally. While James did manage to land an agent and a manager on their very first visit, he didn't find much success auditioning for commercials.
      The next year, he was cast in the Off-Broadway play, "Finding the Sun," which was written and directed by Edward Albee. He describes this as the defining experience for him as an actor, and commuted six hours every day during the limited three-month run for rehearsals and performances in the middle of high school. After that experience, he starred in "Shenandoah" at the Goodspeed Opera House.
      His first on-screen performance came with a starring role in the 1995 feature film "Angus," and he was featured in "I Love You...I Love You Not" with Claire Danes. He also completed the independent feature film "Harvest." But it was via his lead role in the smash hit, "Dawson's Creek" which turned the six foot James into one of the hottest young men in television.
      A dean's list student, Van Der Beek received an academic scholarship from Drew University in Madison, N.J., where he majored in English with a minor in sociology. In his free time, he enjoys writing and playing all kinds of sports.

- Texas Rangers (2000)
- Varsity Blues (1999)
- Castle in the Sky (1999)
- Dawson's Creek (98-00) [TV]
- Harvest (1998)
- Aliens in the Family (1996) [TV]
- I Love You, I Love You Not (96)
- Angus (1995)
- As the World Turns (1995) [TV]
- Clarissa Explains It All (91) [TV]

It's taken almost two years and four false starts, but Texas Rangers is finally going to ride into theatres this Friday.

But only into a paltry 17 American theatres.

Texas Rangers is the $70-million US western filmed in Alberta in the summer of 1999 with an all-star cast that includes James Van Der Beek, Dylan McDermott, Randy Travis, Ashton Kutcher, singer Usher, Tom Skerritt and Rachael Leigh Cook.

Texas Rangers is scheduled to play on TNT some time in the spring of 2002.

Susan Smythe, vice-president of publicity and promotions for Alliance Atlantis, the Canadian company handling Texas Rangers, says the western will open in Canada probably in February.

"Alliance Atlantis has every intention of opening Texas Rangers in Canada and especially Alberta. We have great faith in the film.

"The only reason we couldn't open in day-and-date with the US is that there is a serious shortage of movie screens in Canada at the moment."

Smythe points to the fact Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Monsters, Inc. are playing on an inordinately large number of screens.

Texas Rangers has been plagued by problems and rumours from the time it began shooting in Alberta.

In a recent interview, local wrangler and stunt co-ordinator John Scott claimed Texas Rangers "is unreleasable" and added that "there were 20 horse-related accidents on that production.

"The film was plagued with problems from day one and those problems produced an atmosphere of carelessness."

In a phone interview from his Los Angeles offices, Frank Q. Dobbs, one of the producers of Texas Rangers, insists Scott is exaggerating and that his comments "tend to put the blame on the Alberta wranglers and stunt men and that is grossly unfair."

Dobbs does not deny there were several accidents, but he is quick to point out "there are always minor incidents whenever you are using horses on a film.

"The incidents which John Scott is alluding to had absolutely nothing to do with the competence of the wranglers, but rather with the demands of the director, Steve Miner.

"No one was critically injured on the movie.

"One stunt man (Robby Dunn) was crushed against a tree executing a particularly tricky stunt that involved a team of riders."

Dobbs is adamant that "Alberta is not a dangerous place to film a movie.

"The problem with Texas Rangers was that the movie was being rewritten day by day.

"The movie was originally written with Robert Redford in mind, but when Van Der Beek was riding high on the success of Varsity Blues he mentioned he wanted to do a western and Miramax brought in writers to tailor the film to a much younger cast. It should have been a western in the Sam Peckinpah style, but instead it became another Young Guns."

Dobbs says Texas Rangers "is definitely not the best western, but its faults have nothing to do with the competence or dedication of Alberta filmmakers, wranglers and stunt people.

"It is unconscionable and self-serving for John Scott to suggest differently."

HOLLYWOOD -- Director Steve Miner promises it will be no vacation for TV hunks James Van Der Beek and Dylan McDermott when they film Texas Rangers in Alberta this summer.

Miner has asked Van Der Beek, who stars in Dawson's Creek, and McDermott, who stars in The Practice, to arrive in Calgary a week before shooting begins.

"I'm going to take them up into the mountains for a boot camp," says Miner, who is finishing his big summer thriller Lake Placid.

"I'm really going to toughen these guys up. Rain or shine, I'll make them sleep under the stars in old army blankets and I'll make them dig up grub for their dinner," he jokes.

Texas Rangers takes place 10 years after the end of the American Civil War when the Rangers re-formed to help rid the American southwest of bandits and outlaws.

Sunday, January 10, 1999

No more second string

By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun

NEW YORK -- No one involved with the high school football flick Varsity Blues knew it at the time. But in casting the star of an unknown TV series for the lead, they were setting up one of those life-imitates-art parallels that look so good in interviews.

Dawson's Creek had wrapped but had yet to air when James Van Der Beek auditioned to play Mox, a perennial second-string quarterback in football-crazed Texas who gets moved up when the star quarterback is hurt. Suddenly Mox is the town celeb, every guy wants to be his best friend, every girl in class wants to sleep with him. All of which makes him uncomfortable in ways he can't define.

A nice story. It would look good on screen too, if all the people crowding around trying to get close to "Dawson" didn't make it hard to get any filming done.

"There was definitely a parallel between what happens to me in the movie and what happened to me with Dawson's Creek," says the soft-spoken 22-year-old Van Der Beek, who cuts a slightly different figure in Varsity Blues with his hair dyed dark and with 15 extra pounds of muscle. "We had a scene in a restaurant in Austin and I had to leave 'cause it's a college town and people had seen me and it got around and, um, it got nuts. The guy who plays my father (Joe Pichler) was sitting next to me. And there's all this buzzing, people coming over, people leaning over him and over Scott (co-star Scott Caan) to shake my hand and take my picture. At that point, especially, I wasn't really comfortable with it at all."

For those unaware of the WB Network's place in the vanguard of youth culture, Dawson's Creek is the teen soap from Kevin Williamson (Scream), about a sensitive 16-year-old named Dawson Leery who dreams of becoming Steven Spielberg. Pals include Canadian kid Josh Jackson as Pacey, Michelle Williams as bad girl Jen, and female friend Joey (Katie Holmes). All of them talk with their hearts on their sleeves, as articulately as teen poets.

"We had no idea as we were doing it that it was going to be a hit," says Van Der Beek. "It didn't hit us at all because the show hadn't aired when we were done shooting it. The crew wasn't exactly impressed by us," he says with a laugh.

Nonetheless, during his first TV season hiatus, he'd had enough of Dawson that, "I was looking for projects and I wanted to do something very different from the character I play on TV. Jon Voight was attached to this movie (as the sadistic Coach Kilmer) and, y'know, the chance to work with him! I read for it twice and they still weren't convinced they really wanted me to do it. And, uh, I just kinda stuck to my guns and they asked me to screen test. They would have been crazy to cast me in this role having only seen what I do on Dawson's Creek. And then Brian (director Brian Robbins) actually watched a movie I did when I was 17 (the teen drama Angus) and he said, 'Waitaminit, maybe he can do it.'"

Says Robbins, "Now the story is, 'Wow, brilliant, you went out and got the star of Dawson's Creek!' But it was during shooting that it turned into this amazing phenomenon, which was good for the film, and good for him."

Van der Beek was born in Cheshire, Conn., "where football is huge. They won the state championship five years in a row. I got a scholarship to a private school that didn't have a football team, but my little brother Jared played football for the public school. And he actually was a backup quarterback his senior year, and the starting quarterback got pneumonia and he had to come in in the semifinal game.

"And they won, and he starred," says Van Der Beek, whose family was heavily sports-oriented (his dad was a minor league ballplayer in the Dodgers organization, and his brother is now in college on a baseball scholarship). "I watched my brother go through that whole experience and deal with coaches. So to me that was really exciting. So when I got this part, I kind of felt like we were telling his story.

"Then we got to Texas and met all the football players. They had a huge tryout and they picked 40 of the best athletes in Austin to play these guys. And they'd all played ball in high school and college and I talked to them, and I realized we were really kind of telling their stories as well.

"I mean, I was like everybody else when I read the script. I thought, 'Football's big, but is it really this big?' And the answer is absolutely yes."

Like everyone else in the cast of Dawson's Creek, Van Der Beek admits to "getting a lot of offers to do horror movies. But I'm glad this one is my first after the show. I really liked the story; I was able to relate to it. I saw it as a movie about standing up to authority, questioning the society in which you're born. It's more about that than it is about winning.

"Then there was the opportunity to work with Jon Voight, which was a blast. We established our characters' relationship before we pursued a friendship. We'd have a scene where we're screaming at each other and it would be, 'Cut!' Then Jon slapping me on the back saying, `C'mon, let's go have lunch!'"

Says Voight: "James is a good kid, they're all good kids and I feel very paternal toward them. But he especially is getting that celebrity right now, and hopefully because he's examined the nature of it for the movie, he'll be better prepared for his own celebrity."

Not that you can expect the big screen to drag Van Der Beek away any time soon. There is, after all, that little six-year Dawson's Creek contract. "You can ask me in six years how I feel about it, but I love Kevin Williamson, he's just a fantastic human being, and Dawson's Creek has given me some incredible opportunities.

"Right now is a learning period for me. All I want to do is set things up so that Dawson isn't the only character I'm known for."

Sunday January 10, 1999

Peek a Beek

By LOUIS B. HOBSON -- Calgary Sun

NEW YORK -- At 21, James Van Der Beek is finally getting to be the coolest kid in school.

For the past two years, Van Der Beek has played Dawson Leery, the sensitive, wannabe filmmaker on the hip TV series Dawson's Creek.

As Dawson, Van Der Beek gets to romance both Katie Holmes, who plays Joey, and Michelle Williams, who stars as the sexy Jen.

In the football drama Varsity Blues, opening Friday, he plays Jonathan Moxon, a high school senior who leads his football team in a rebellion against their iron-fisted coach (Jon Voight).

"I was never the popular kid in school. Absolutely nobody had a crush on me in high school," insists Van Der Beek. "I was a real loner. I used to write stories to express how it felt to be such an outsider. Fortunately, I had an English teacher who encouraged me to write. He made me feel valuable for being different and I'm still grateful to him to this day."

What made Van Der Beek feel different was his love of musical theatre. While his classmates listened to pop music, he borrowed the cast albums of Broadway shows from the local library.

"I stumbled on to my love of theatre quite by accident in junior high school," recalls Van Der Beek.

"At that time, I was on the football team. I got a concussion early in the season so I couldn't play for the rest of the year."

A few of his friends talked Van Der Beek into auditioning for a community production of Grease. He got the lead and was hooked for good. At age 18, Van Der Beek was cast as the school bully in the movie Angus.

"My agents and managers and the film's producers told me Angus was going to propel me into stardom. It bombed.

"When I was offered Dawson's Creek, I was an unknown New York stage actor. I thought it was an interesting premise but I thought it would go the way of Claire Danes's My So Called Life.

"I thought the critics would like it but that nobody would watch us."

Van Der Beek couldn't have been more wrong.

Before the end of the first season, Dawson's Creek had turned the young actor into a teen heartthrob. He was being mobbed whenever he appeared in public.

He insists that "getting recognized in public was fun for about three minutes. Now it's scary.

"The show has become so popular that we have to have tight security at the studio in North Carolina where we shoot."

Van Der Beek, 21, admits his celebrity has "made relationships very difficult and it's been particularly hard on my parents and my 17-year-old sister. I come from a small New England town and my family have had their privacy invaded by fans and paparazzi."

Van Der Beek is asked constantly how close he is to Dawson.

"Dawson is 16. I'm 21. Dawson is remarkably close to what I was like at that age but I've grown so far beyond him that I can only treat him as a character role.

"I'm trying everything possible to distance myself from Dawson and his sensitivity. It's one of the reasons I chose to star in Varsity Blues.

"I wanted to act and look radically different.

"I cut and dyed my hair and I gained 15 pounds. I'm hoping this will show Dawson's Creek fans once and for all that I'm just an actor playing a role on TV.

"People call me Dawson on the street. There's a kind of familiarity because I'm in their living rooms every week but it's also disheartening to think these people don't know or care who I really am."

Van Der Beek says that filming Varsity Blues proved to be the rude awakening he'd hoped for.

"The football players who play my teammates were pretty unimpressed with my sensitive Dawson's Creek image. They had no qualms about kicking my butt out there on the field.

"It felt great to be treated as an equal."

This wasn't always the case.

The production company needed thousands of extras to play the fans at the various games in the film. They advertised in the local papers, mentioning that Van Der Beek was the star of the film, and were able to meet their quotas every day of filming.

Director Brian (Good Burger) Robbins recalls that "whenever we needed the extras to break into a frenzy we'd just haul James out onto the field and we'd get all the enthusiasm we needed."

Paul Walker, who plays one of the football players in the film, says that Van Der Beek "is really a sweet, nice guy. He hates the image but it really is him.

"He has all these teenage girls throwing themselves at him. He wouldn't think of taking advantage of them.

"We'd always tease him and ask him to give us the phone numbers they'd slip him or throw to him."

Van Der Beek says the most daunting thing about his life at the moment is not his adoring but unruly fans. It's "the realization that Dawson's Creek has at least four more seasons. I never thought it would go on this long. It's pretty difficult to keep looking so young. I end up shaving two or three times a day to make certain there's no hint of a shadow."

He predicts that Dawson "will lose his virginity this season around spring sweeps but beyond that I really don't have much of an idea where the storyline and characters are headed."

Monday, 20 July, 1998

Going with the flow

By LOUIS B. HOBSON -- Calgary Sun

It took James Van Der Beek six years, but he can finally call himself an actor.

Van Der Beek, who plays Dawson Leery on the popular teen TV melodrama Dawson's Creek, was 15 when he announced to his parents he wanted to be an actor.

"When I was in (junior high school) my passion was football," says Van Der Beek. "I had never given acting a second thought."

Then during a school football match, he suffered a concussion that sidelined him for the season.

"Some of my friends were trying out for a community theatre production of Grease, so I went along to the auditions. I got the lead and fell in love with theatre."

Van Der Beek pleaded with his parents to let him try his luck at getting

an agent in New York and his mother accompanied him to the Big Apple.

"I kept going out for these great auditions but each time, Edward Norton would be there and would end up getting the part we all tried out for including (the young psychopath) in Primal Fear."

Van Der Beek kept auditioning until Dawson's Creek creator Kevin Williamson (of Scream fame) saw him for the role of Dawson Leery.

"When I got the call that they wanted me to audition, I reminded them that I was 20 and the character was 15, but they said Kevin liked my look."

Van Der Beek got to play football again this summer during his hiatus from the series.

He filmed a movie called Varsity Blues about Texas high school football.