James Van Der Beek, who has departed for the great unkown at forty-eight after a courageous and unflinchingly public fight with cancer, leaves behind a legacy that is equal parts poignant and preposterous. He will forever be the man who taught an entire generation how to cry on television—properly, operatically, with the kind of commitment that made strangers on the internet decide this was the only acceptable response to minor inconvenience. The Dawson’s Creek crying scene, now a digital artefact older than most of its users, remains his most enduring contribution to culture. It is mercilessly reused, yet somehow never feels cruel when directed at him; the tears were too honest for that.
In his prime he embodied a very specific American fantasy: the sensitive, articulate teenage boy who quoted Spielberg and treated heartbreak like a graduate seminar. Dawson Leery was, by any rational standard, insufferable. Van Der Beek played him with such disarming sincerity that the character became lovable in spite of himself, and the actor emerged as the rare teen idol who seemed genuinely surprised to be one. Hollywood, unsure what to do with earnestness once puberty ended, sent him to football fields in whipped-cream bikinis and later to the thankless terrain of straight-to-video thrillers. He accepted the demotion with good grace and kept working.
His later role as FBI agent Elijah Mundo in CSI: Cyber—an enterprise whose very name sounded like a prank on the audience—offered steady employment and the quiet dignity of not having to emote quite so extravagantly. He brought to it the same unshowy competence that marked most of his post-Creek career: reliable, watchable, never bitter. In his final years he spoke openly about illness and family, displaying a wry, self-aware humour that suggested he had finally located the joke everyone else had been laughing at for decades. He appeared, at long last, entirely at ease with the absurdity of his own myth.
He is survived by his wife, Kimberly, and their children, who will inherit a father’s gentle decency and the eternal challenge of explaining to the world that the crying man on the internet was, in real life, rather good company.