When an actor like James Van Der Beek dies, the obvious thing would be to concentrate on their biggest role. In the case of Van Der Beek, that would be Dawson’s Creek, Kevin Williamson’s soapy drama that ran for six seasons across the millennium.

And that would be perfectly justified, since in its time Dawson’s Creek was a genuine sensation. It might be hard to remember, since the show became the water that all teen drama swims in, but Dawson’s Creek had a rare knack for meeting its audience where it was.

Shows that were aimed at similar demographics tended to either be too goofy or too moralising, but Dawson managed to find a rare sweet spot. It didn’t talk down to the teens who watched it; in fact, it made a point of making them emotionally self-aware and hyperliterate. If you watched it as a teen, you were watching the version of yourself that you most wanted to be.

As the titular Dawson, Van Der Beek had arguably the trickiest role on the show. He was the audience surrogate. While Joshua Jackson’s Pacey got to be cool and funny and dangerous, Dawson was tasked with holding the moral centre. This was tricky because that can be an extremely boring note to play, and so it came to pass. After the show had been on air for a few seasons, viewers started to turn against the sheer wet blandness of the character.

For a lot of actors, this would have been a career-ender. A defining role as a nice guy sap is a straitjacket that few can escape from. But this is where James Van Der Beek got to stretch his muscles. As well as making his name, Dawson gave him something to push against. And this is something he did gloriously.

While Dawson’s Creek was still on air, Van Der Beek began stretching the limits of his reputation. There was a cameo in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where he got to play himself as Dawson, knowingly chewing the scenery through a series of faux-angsty monologues. In the 2002 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, he went a step further, playing no less than Patrick Bateman’s little brother; a cold, morally vacant, cruelly indifferent drug dealer. And it turned out that he had much more fun playing the anti-Dawson than Dawson himself.

After proving his range, Van Der Beek spent the next few years settling into a steady stream of guest spots and bit parts that traded on his familiarity. He turned up on Ugly Betty, How I Met Your Mother and One Tree Hill. But arguably his greatest role would come in 2012, nine years after the end of Dawson’s Creek, where he got to play himself (again) in the tremendous Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23.

Cancelled long before its time, Don’t Trust the B---- was a gleefully nasty little sitcom about a brazen party girl played by Krysten Ritter, who spent her life conning her flatmates out of their rent money. It was funny from start to finish, but it only truly caught fire when Van Der Beek strolled onscreen. This is because the version of himself that he portrayed was as wildly self-lacerating as anything you have ever seen.

This Van Der Beek had already enjoyed his moment of fame, and was raging against his growing anonymity. He was stupendously vain and endlessly grasping, and determined to shag his way back to the top. It was a piece of performance as self-criticism that only an especially well-adjusted actor can pull off. Nicolas Cage tried something similar a few years ago with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and spent the entire press run trying to convince everyone that he was nothing like his character. Van Der Beek trusted his audience to figure that out for themselves, and it only made his performance funnier.

It also led to one of the most bafflingly brilliant talkshow appearances of all time, when Van Der Beek appeared on The Eric Andre Show in 2013. Halfway through the interview Andre brought out doppelgangers of both of them, and Van Der Beek’s quiet confusion as the encounter collapsed into a nightmarish feedback loop remains the high point of the series.

This was all built from Dawson’s Creek, which gave him a platform from which to subsequently warp and twist his persona. But the fact that Van Der Beek managed to cover such a huge spectrum of roles in such a short space of time proves what an undeniable talent he was.