’10 Things I Hate About You’ Star Addresses Claims They Ran a Cult

Andrew Keegan is setting the record straight on those long-standing rumors that he started a cult. Appearing on iHeartRadio’s Pod Meets World podcast on Monday, the 10 Things I Hate About You actor, 45, addressed claims that he started a “cult” in the 2010s after he purchased an abandoned temple and founded the spiritual organization Full Circle.

“I moved to Venice in my early twenties and just got really immersed in the culture and the community,” Keegan told Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle. “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. 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?’”

Keegan ultimately purchased the temple in 2014, and after repurposing it, the temple became the home of Full Circle, a “spiritual community center” based in Los Angeles, according to the official website. The group went on to participate in numerous protests, including Occupy Wall Street, in order to “do some positive things for the community.” Keegan, whose other credits include 7th Heaven and Camp Nowhere, said that “looking back [it] was insane. I was putting down tens of thousands of dollars, but we opened it up and spent three years and really did build an amazing friend group. We went through something really significant from 2014 to 2017.”

Shortly after it was founded, Full Circle gained headlines and became “click-bait central” after a Vice article titled “One of the Stars of 10 Things I Hate About You Started a Religion” was published. In the article, the reporter said they were greeted by a man called “Third Eye,” who described Keegan as a leader who gets the “ultimate say on all things.” Keegan said “they came in and y’know, I probably should’ve had a little more media training at the time, and I was just like, ‘Yeah, everything is great, this is all these wild things going on, sacred.’”

“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 joked, adding that Full Circle is the “opposite of what you would imagine…we really just got together and we did a Sunday thing, and we did I think almost 1,000 events in three years, and it was actually really hard, and it was really beneficial to a lot of people. I still hear about it now, people are like, ‘That was such a great time.’ So it’s kind of the opposite of what I guess you would imagine – there was no doctrine.”

Keegan, who theorized that the group’s name may have led to some confusion, said, “For all intents and purposes, it was a really cool community center for a bunch of people in Venice for a few years.”