10 Things I Hate About You's Andrew Keegan Addressed Rumors That He's A Cult Leader

Andrew Keegan is, to this day, probably best known for his role as the mean, popular guy — Joey Donner — who kickstarts the plot of "10 Things I Hate About You." After paying Patrick Verona (the late Heath Ledger) to woo Padua High's resident "shrew" Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles), he thinks he's free to take Kat's younger sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) to the prom. Unfortunately, Bianca has already fallen for new student Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and due to Joey's deception and generally terrible vibe, Bianca punches him in the nose at said prom. Aside from that film, it seems as if Keegan might be best known for being an alleged cult leader.

During an interview on "Pod Meets World" (via Variety) — a podcast run by "Boy Meets World" alumni Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle — Keegan addressed the long-running rumors that his organization, Full Circle, was a religious cult. (These rumors came from a 2014 Vice profile of Keegan and Full Circle appropriately titled "One of the Stars of '10 Things I Hate About You' Started a Religion.")

"You mean when I woke up one day and I was anointed a cult leader?" Keegan responded when he was asked to respond to major stories that have spread about him throughout the years. "There was this interesting group of hippie types, if you will, in Venice," the actor continued, explaining how Full Circle came to be. "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?'"

Throughout the podcast interview, Keegan expanded on how the alleged cult god started — and even confessed that he ponied up quite a bit of money to put together this space for what he revealed were veterans of the Occupy Wall Street movement. "Looking back, it was insane," he admitted. "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."

Keegan also had to discuss the fact that, in the aforementioned Vice story, the whole place gave off the unmistakable energy of a cult. The report details how an unnamed man referred to as Third Eye served as some sort of official greeter for the organization and also said he was part of the "inner circle," describing Keegan as the leader whose word was law. So how did Keegan address those issues?

"I probably should have had a little bit more media training at the time," Keegan told the "Pod Meets World" hosts. "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.'"

Ultimately, what Andrew Keegan seemed to take specific issue with was the term "cult leader." Danielle Fishel appeared to agree with him, saying that as he was describing Full Circle — which Keegan said didn't follow any specific doctrine and was more like a "community center" despite having a handbook — she imagined a gang of friends hanging out at a music festival like Burning Man rather than a sinister cult like Heaven's Gate.

"But 'cult leader' kind of leans unto the Heaven's Gate," Keegan acknowledged. "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."

Building upon that, Keegan spoke to what he viewed as the positives of Full Circle — namely, the community it created. "We had thousands of people come through over the years and just a ton of events and dinner parties," the former teen heartthrob said. "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."

In the end, Andrew Keegan's argument regarding whether or not he was a cult leader is as follows: people make stuff up when you're even mildly famous. In fact, the "7th Heaven" actor also brought up the fact that he was engaged in a lawsuit with two different news organizations over a headline alleging that he sold hard kombucha without proper licensing. In discussing the lawsuit — which was dismissed — he does seem to admit he did exactly what the headlines regarding his alcoholic kombucha racket said.

"I think at this point we all know, you can't really believe what you read," Keegan argued. "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." Variety notes that in his defamation suit, Keegan claimed he was not at Full Circle while selling the unlawful kombucha, but he appears to contradict himself with this statement.

In any case, Keegan wrapped up this discussion by making an arguably weird statement: "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." Only the people involved with Full Circle really know if it was a cult or not, but ultimately, we do know that Keegan thinks being referred to as a cult leader is sort of neat.