One of our favorite '90s crushes is setting the record straight on a longstanding rumor. Andrew Keegan, best known for his roles on the TV show 7th Heaven and the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, recently gave more details about the spiritual group he founded in the 2010s. At the time, the media reported that the group was a cult, and Keegan went from teen heartthrob to charming leader. But according to Andrew himself, it all was blown out of proportion.
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He said it wasn't a cult — just people vibing together.
Andrew appeared on the podcast Pod Meets World this week. During the interview, he made it clear that the spiritual group he founded, Full Circle, was never a cult but more of a group of people who just vibed well with each other.
"For all intents and purposes, it was a really cool community center for a bunch of people in Venice for a few years," he said.
The news of the group went viral, and that was it.
In 2014, media outlet Vice found out about the group and wrote an article about it. "They just really created a very interesting, colorful story and put it together," Andrew explained. "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."
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The group started out fairly organically.
When Andrew moved to Venice Beach, California, in his 20s, he discovered the area had a really eclectic, spiritual vibe. "There was this interesting group of hippie types, if you will, in Venice," he shared.
He went on to explain that an opportunity came to purchase an old house of worship that had been, among other things, a Hare Krishna temple. "We were like, 'Why don’t we get some people together and let’s open this place up?'" he said.
He admitted to spending 'tens of thousands of dollars' on the group.
“Looking back, it was insane," he explained. "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."
He does look back at that time fondly.
Thanks to the Vice article, news of the group reached "clickbait central," with Andrew admitting that he could have benefitted from "a little bit more media training at the time."
Still, he’s proud of what the group was able to accomplish during its time. "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,'" he said.
