What a coincidence! Busy Philipps was enjoying a quiet afternoon at a local café on Thursday, March 22, when she spotted her former Dawson’s Creek costar James Van Der Beek.
“You guys, I’m sitting at this coffee shop and I’m writing about Dawson’s Creek,” the 38-year-old actress said in a series of videos on her Instagram Story. “I just looked out the window, and across the street, James Van Der Beek was walking with two of his kids. F–king weird!” (The actor, 41, and his wife, Kimberly, are the parents of Olivia, 7, Joshua, 6, Annabel, 4, and Emilia, 2. They are expecting a fifth child.)
Visibly caught off guard, she continued, “I don’t mean to be … crazy but I literally just wrote his name and then looked up and he was walking. Does it mean that I’m in the right place? What is happening?”
Philipps announced in August that she was working on a collection of autobiographical essays that is slated to be published later this fall by Simon & Schuster’s imprint Touchstone.
“I’m not allowed to say the title of it, but it’s a good title,” she teased in an Instagram video at the time. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to write this book. I’m just so grateful someone finally asked.”
The Freaks and Geeks alum has been close friends with Van Der Beek since they costarred in the final seasons of the WB drama in the early aughts. They reunited on screen in July when she filled in for Kelly Ripa on Live With Kelly and Ryan.
“We were together on a little television show called Dawson’s Creek,” Philipps said on the morning talk show at the time. “It was weird for both of us. We were both in weird places.”
