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It's hard to imagine what 7th Heaven's Reverend Camden would say about 90s teen heartthrob Andrew Keegan (who memorably portrayed Jessica Biel‘s boyfriend on the long-running, insufferable WB/CW family drama) being rumored to be part of a cult in his personal life. Then again, the actor who played Reverend Camden, Stephen Collins, has been accused of far worse accusations in his off-camera life… but we're quickly getting off topic here.
Andrew Keegan addressed the cult rumors on Monday's episode of Pod Meets World, the popular Boy Meets World rewatch podcast co-hosted by the former series stars Rider Strong, Danielle Fishel, and Will Friedle.
Keegan, who also starred on Boy Meets World and in the classic teen comedy film 10 Things I Hate About You, said on the podcast that Full Circle, the controversial organization he started in the 2010s, was “just a really cool community center.”
He elaborated more on the spiritual group he founded ten years ago. “I moved to Venice in my early twenties and just got really immersed in the culture and the community,” Keegan explained.
“There was this interesting kind of group of hippie types, if you will,” he said of Venice, an area known in Los Angeles for its countercultural bohemian tendencies. “There was the old Hare Krishna temple… and it was sitting there empty and we were like, ‘Yo, why don't we just get some people together and let's open this place up.”
Keegan continued that “Looking back [it] was insane. I was putting down thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, and when we opened it up we spent three years and really did build an amazing friend group.”
After those three years, Full Circle closed its doors in 2017. “For all intents and purposes, it was just a really cool community center for people in Venice for three years,” said Keegan.
He did admit, however, that he could have handled the media hoopla surrounding the organization and its purpose better. One of the more explosive reports about Keegan and Full Circle came from a Vice article in 2014.
“They came in and y'know, I probably should've had a little more media training at the time,” Keegan confessed. “I was just like, ‘Yeah, everything is great, this is all these wild things going on, sacred.'”
But Keegan stood by his argument that everything about Full Circle was on the up-and-up. “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.”
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He added, “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 also gave a pretty honest assessment about how the group's name, Full Circle, possibly added fuel to the cult-associated rumor mill flames. “Maybe we should have come up with a different name; I thought Full Circle was pretty good, you know, what goes around comes around,” explained Keegan.
“But again, it wasn't something with such a specific agenda at the time. It just sort of evolved from a group of people.”
Full Circle's demise was due largely to a police raid of its headquarters for unpermitted kombucha sales — a sentence which must tickle the funny bones and solidify the stereotypes of LA-haters everywhere.
However, there was nothing funny about it for Keegan, who according to Entertainment Weekly, sued Examiner.com and its parent company Anschutz Entertainment in 2015 for reporting he had been arrested during the raid. Keegan said he wasn't present during the raid and the case was eventually dismissed.
Now with the benefit of hindsight, Keegan is able to chuckle about the rumors regarding his Full Circle organization. “I don't know anybody else that's being called a cult leader, so it's kind of like a badge of honor,” he quipped.
The Pod Meets World gang also get around to eventually discussing Keegan's appearance on Boy Meets World, so it's definitely worth a listen for all the 90s teenybopper Andrew Keegan fans out there.
