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Andrew Keegan, best known for his roles in 10 Things I Hate About You, 7th Heaven, Party of Five and for being a ‘heartthrob’ in the early aughts, was rumoured to have started a cult once upon a time.

There he is next to Heath Ledger in the first mentioned rom-com.

Keegan became “click-bait central,” as word spread about him starting a “cult” after a VICE reporter came to visit his community gathering called Full Circle.

The journalist wrote a story about the experience in 2014, titled “One of the Stars of ’10 Things I Hate About You’ Started a Religion”. The story revealed how the journo was greeted by a man named Third Eye, part of the “inner circle” of “enlightened” members, who told them that Keegan is the leader who has the “ultimate say on all things”.

Sounds culty, alright.

“You mean when I woke up one day and I was anointed a cult leader?” Keagan joked on the Pod Meets World podcast recently, where co-hosts Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle give their guests — many of whom are actors who grew up on TV in the 90s — the opportunity to debunk any headlines about them.

“I probably should have had a little bit more media training at the time,” Keegan said on the podcast.

Keagan explained that he merely moved to Venice Beach in his early 20s, and “got immersed in the culture and the community.”

“There was this interesting group of hippie types, if you will, in Venice. I’m sure if you went on the west side, there’s definitely a lot of spirituality,” he explained. “I was connected with some folks and we had this opportunity. This old Hare Krishna Temple, it was sitting there empty and we were like, ‘Why don’t we get some people together and let’s open this place up?’”

The group, who had previously partaken in Occupy Wall Street, wanted to “do some positive things for the community” so they made their Full Circle community in 2014 and threw a couple of events:

“They just really created a very interesting, colorful story and put it together… we really just got together and did a Sunday thing. We did almost 1,000 events in three years and it was actually really hard. It was really beneficial to a lot of people, I still hear about it now, where people are like, ‘That was such a great time.’”

Keagan said he didn’t start a cult, but he admitted to spending a small fortune on the spiritual group he started:

“Looking back, it was insane. I was putting down 10s of thousands of dollars, but we opened it up and spent three years and really did build an amazing friend group,” Keegan said. “We went through something really significant from 2014 to 2017.”

Full Circle was “the opposite of what you would imagine” from reading the stories he said:

“There was no doctrine. We were just getting people together. ‘The Co-Creator’s Handbook’ was the handbook we used… For all intents and purposes, it was a really cool community center for a bunch of people in Venice for a few years.”

The actor admitted that maybe the group needed a better name to avoid the cult references:

“Maybe we should have come up with a different name. I thought Full Circle was pretty good, you know, what goes around comes around. I don’t know. It wasn’t something with such a specific agenda at the time. It just evolved from a group of people. We had thousands of people come through over the years and just a ton of events and dinner parties. There was actually a podcast I heard recently where they were talking about it and trying to figure it out. At the end, they kind of landed on, it seems like a cool place to hang out — and that’s what it was.”

While Keegan has addressed these wild rumours before, he mentioned in the interview that he actually had to file a defamation lawsuit.

“I think at this point we all know, you can’t really believe what you read. Anybody can call anybody anything. I actually did end up filing a defamation lawsuit against AEG and Newsmax for one of the things that happened there,” he said. “They have an ability to basically say whatever they want. Put up a fight and it ends up costing you money and legal fees. Of course, this recent case of defamation worked out for someone.”

“I look back at it now and I’m like, I don’t know anybody else who is being called a cult leader so it’s kind of like a badge of honor,” Keegan quipped at the end of the episode.

[source:nbcnews]