Andrew Keegan doesn’t talk much about 10 Things I Hate About That You as a career-defining masterpiece. He talks about it as a weird, wonderful summer where everyone got high together.
Keegan, 47 now, dropped by Josh McBride’s McBride Rewind podcast. He was reflecting on 1999. On filming a comedy with a teenager from Perth, Australia, who nobody knew yet.
Heath Ledger.
Before Brokeback. Before the Joker. Before all of it. He was just a kid showing up on set with zero American credits. Keegan remembers this clearly. The cast was stuck in the same hotel floor. Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon–Levitt, Larisa Olelnyk, Gabrielle Union. Just kids really. Or young adults trying to act like it.
We would smoke weed. We got high together and had a great we said. We bonded.
That’s not a quote for a corporate bio. It’s the truth of that set. The off-screen chaos became on-screen magic. According to Keegan, Ledger just took that natural joy and poured it straight into the lens. He hadn’t done much then. Nobody knew him. Which made him freer than anyone else.
And it didn’t stop when the cameras turned off.
Usually, actors part ways. Keegan didn’t. Ledger moved to Los Angeles right after wrap. They spent an entire year hanging out. Just running around. Auditions. Failed auditions. Good days. Bad days. The actual film barely registers in Keegan’s memory anymore.
The film is hardly what I remembers it was more about spending the year working on auditions We just ran around. it seemed like. every day.
It feels scattered. It probably was. But Keegan looked back recently with a heavy heart. He realized how prolific Ledger was as an artist. Before the overdose. Before the silence. He was creating so much, all the time.
Keegan didn’t see it back then. Who could have? We tend to miss the vitality of people who are burning out bright. Now it’s just memory. And weed smoke. And the sound of a friend laughing on a hotel hallway.
