Name: James Van Der Beek on "Dawson's Creek" and "Varsity Blues" | Late Night with Conan O’Brien
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T21:58:15.000Z
Duration: 5 min 8 s
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Are those real prescription glasses or are they.

That's good to hear, because there was a period in the.

There's a period in the 80s, remember, where, like, Rob Lowe and.

They were wearing the fake glasses that you didn't need for a prescription.

No, I just assumed that when somebody wears glasses, they need them.

No, it was a whole fashion statement that, like, hunky actors did for a while, where it was like, I read a lot, and

Cause I've watched the show a bunch of times, and it really looks.

It looks like a beautiful, idyllic place.

It doesn't look like they're shooting that in Los Angeles.

We're actually shooting in Wilmington, North Carolina.

You know, it's not the most exciting place in the world.

Do they shoot any other TV shows in that area?

Their big thing down there was Matlock for a while.

But do people like you go into the local store and they tell tall tales about Matlock?

Everybody talks about Matlock like it was the Second Coming.

I mean, you know, when I was, you know, watching television, I was about 30 years too young for Matlock, I think, but.

Well, I mean, it's so like, you know, Mallock is like king down there.

I mean, you know, he was on six Seasons, and everybody wears the jackets and everything.

And everybody compares us to the mania that surrounded Andy Griffith.

Like, why can't you guys be more, like Matlow?

People will mob us on set, and they'll be like, man, I worked with Andy Griffith, and

The movie has an interesting plot twist in it where it sounds like something out of an Aerosmith video where the teacher.

You find out that the teacher is secretly a stripper.

And that does Seem like something that Steven Tyler would be involved with.

He actually was one of the writers, I think.

That's what really happens in the part of the movie.

And no, people are gonna still see the movie.

Did you ever find out anything weird about any of your teachers when you were.

I mean, at one point I found out a sociology professor I had was a big pothead.

So I would actually use that to my advantage in writing papers for him.

At one point I was supposed to write this paper on Che Guevara and I was doing a play in New York and I didn't have any time to research it.

So instead of researching him, I actually wrote a paper on how Americans perceive Che Guevara as a symbol and how to what it says about how Americans view Latin Americans.

And so my opening sentence was, walk into any college dorm room in the country.

And after admiring the dirty laundry spewn about the floor and admiring the six foot graphite bong in the corner, take a look at the walls.

And I talked about how walls were a great indicator of where students.

They're going to say you wrote it on hemp.

I was reading an interview with you today in preparation for the interview, and

they, they said that you once accidentally got a little high.

And I was thinking, how do you accidentally get a little high?

I was playing this pothead and we were smoking ginseng out of a bong because it looked like pot.

And that's what they do in movies to make it look like you're in this movie.

It was like, you know, the prop guy's cousin, Sponge, supposedly.

So nobody really wanted to try to smoke a bong full of ginseng.