Born in Connecticut in 1977, Van Der Beek got his start as a teenager in stage productions in New York City. He was accepted into Drew University, but left before completing his degree after being cast in the lead role of Dawson’s Creek. As Dawson Leery, Van Der Beek led 128 episodes of the series, which helped define the then-fledgling WB network. Though he went on to perform a variety of roles in the years after the show ended in 2003, Dawson remained Van Der Beek’s most famous part throughout his life, occasionally to his annoyance. “Some characters live with you for a while and you wonder how they’re doing and what they’d be doing now,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I felt pretty complete putting that one on the shelf and not looking at him again.”
The year after Dawson’s Creek premiered, Van Der Beek was seen in Varsity Blues as Jonathan “Mox” Moxon. That was a role that he wore proudly for the rest of his life. “You know what? I don’t get tired about talking about Varsity Blues,” he told The Ringer in 2020. “It was such a fun experience and such a seminal experience. It was my first movie that was a hit. Everybody from the cast to the directors to the producers, we were all hungry. We all really had something to prove.” Van Der Beek won an MTV movie award for the performance, and followed Varsity Blues with roles in films like The Rules Of Attraction and Scary Movie.
In the years after Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek found a niche with roles that knowingly poked fun at his own public image. In 2012, he began playing a fictionalized version of himself on Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23 opposite Krysten Ritter, Dreama Walker, and Eric Andre. “It absolutely, I think, took me out of one mold that I’d been in for a while,” he told Vulture upon the show’s conclusion in 2013. “I wish I could say it was a calculated, intelligent decision, but it really was just something that I thought was funny, that I hadn’t really done before, and there were just great people involved.”
Eventually, Van Der Beek seemed to have real fun blowing up this image. His three-episode role in How I Met Your Mother also poked a bit of fun at himself, depicting him as the aging boyfriend of 90s pop star Robin Sparkles. In 2017, Van Der Beek starred as Diplo in What Would Diplo Do?, which The A.V. Club‘s Danette Chavez remarked “humanizes as much as satirizes its big-name subject.” “My reaction to fame was to run away from it,” he reflected to ABC News in 2020 before sharing how his mindset eventually changed. “Just recognize that you’re able to make people very happy by doing something very simple.”
Van Der Beek’s family has shared a GoFundMe to help alleviate the “significant financial strain” that came with his illness. You can find that fundraiser here.