World Is Van Der Beek's Creek

With a hit TV show and a new film, actor James Van Der Beek has landed on the fast track to stardom. He tells CBS This Morning Contributor Eleanor Mondale that, in the last year, he has moved up from staying on the sofa to sleeping in a suite, all because of his role as a small-town teen on Dawson's Creek.

"He's so sweet and shy and innocent and scared," Van Der Beek says of his TV character. "It reminds me of one aspect of myself when I was 15, and all the things you think as an adolescentÂ…and you're afraid to say."

Van Der Beek, 21, says he is proud of the straightforward approach Dawson's Creek takes on such subjects as sex.

"It doesn't shy away from anything that teen-agers are thinking about," he explains.

What teen-age girls are thinking about is Van Der Beek, reports Mondale, and he's a bit perplexed by the pandemonium that now follows him everywhere.

"Before Dawson's Creek, I could never afford to shop at places like Abercrombie & Fitch." he says. "And now I can't really go there, because every time I walk in, it gets insane. They ask me to leave, eventually."

His new film, Varsity Blues, was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend. In it, Van Der Beek plays a high school football hero. Jon Voight is his hard-driving coach.

Asked if he was nervous about working with Voight, Van Der Beek says, "I was terrified to work with Jon Voight."

But Voight himself says he really likes Van Der Beek. Because the characters they play in Varsity Blues are antagonists, they had some juicy scenes together. Voight embraced the rising star, and became something of a mentor.

"We would sit there at the table and wait for his stories," Van Der Beek recalls. "We'd just sit there and listen to him."

The young actor says Voight helped him to enjoy the hoopla of his fame but also to focus on the future and, as Van Der Beek puts it, "to avoid the trap of the teen idol who grows up and goes down with his show."

Ironically, it was a football injury in the eighth grade that led Van Der Beek to acting. Sidelined by a concussion, he tried out for the school play and landed the lead role of Danny Zuko in Grease. Then he tried some community theater and fell in love with the stage.

The eldest of three children, Van Der Beek grew up in Cheshire, Conn., about three hours from New York City. He eventually had roles in Finding the Sun, an off-Broadway play written and directed by Edward Albee, and in a production of Shenandoah at the Goodspeed Opera House in Haddam, Conn.

He had a minor role in the film Angus (1995) and is featured in an upcoming release, I Love YouÂ…I Love You Not with Claire Danes.