James Van Der Beek realised his life was going to change when he saw his face on a billboard for the first time

Speaking at Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, James shared: "I made a movie when I was 17, and everybody said, 'Are you ready for this to change your life?' And I was like, 'Oh, yeah!' I remember going to that movie with my college friends, and there was only one other person in the theatre. I was like, 'I don't think this is going to change my life.' And it didn't at all.

"So when I was in 'Dawson's Creek', we were in North Carolina - we were far, far, far from Hollywood, we were on the WB Network, which, at the time, was a network that I didn't even get on my closed-circuit cable in my dorm room - so some people were saying, 'Are you ready for this to change your life?' [I was] like, 'I've been down this road before. This is not going to change anything.' And they said, 'Oh no, they're buying billboards,' and I said, 'Whatever.' And then they flew me to Los Angeles, and I saw a billboard with my face, like, blown up a thousand times bigger than my head already is, and I saw my name on the billboard."

James quickly realised that the TV show was destined to change his life.

The actor admitted that 'Dawson's Creek's success and popularity exceeded his own expectations.

James - who starred alongside Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams - said: "Two weeks in, I was doing an appearance in Seattle, and they said, 'There are going to be 100 people here.' And I said, 'There are not going to be 100 people.' And there were, like, 500, and they were screaming, and I was like, 'Whoa, this thing is going to be way bigger than I ever thought it was going to be.'"