From Dawson's Creek To His Life Today

James Van Der Beek shot to fame playing perhaps the teen drama genre's ultimate nice — and some would say most insufferable — guy, Dawson Leery. But since "Dawson's Creek" came to a tear-jerking end in 2003, the actor has done his best to show that he can play the bad boy, too.

In 2007, for example, he guested on "Criminal Minds" as Tobias Hankel, a dissociative identity disorder-suffering serial killer. Two years later, he starred as kidnapper Tony Zappa in Lifetime true crime movie "Taken in Broad Daylight." And then, in 2011, he played another procedural murderer, Sean Albert, in "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit."

Speaking to TV Insider in 2020, Van Der Beek admitted that he doesn't have to dig too deep to inhabit such dangerous characters: "In the beginning of my career, I did what a lot of younger actors do, which is, you get a role with some darkness and you think, 'I've gotta find the darkness. I've gotta get there.' By that point, I recognized, 'You know what? There's darkness in the world, and I can channel that pretty easily; it's just a matter of doing it cleanly without it sticking to me.' And that freed me up from having to find anything or live anything or carry anything, and I was able to let the reality of the character just flow through me."

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