Closeup: Will Keenan

Like fellow native son David Lynch, actor Will Keenan hides a demented interior beneath a deceptively wholesome facade. Born and raised in the Great Northeast, the raffishly handsome Keenan made his mark in Tromeo and Juliet, a warped retelling of the Shakespeare classic filtered through the shlocked-up lens of Troma studios, best known for the Toxic Avenger pictures. Keenan continues his exploration of the mind's stickier corners as the lead in Frank Grow's hallucinogenic Love God, where he plays LaRue, a mental patient afflicted with Compulsive Reading Syndrome, an uncontrollable urge to read and then destroy printed matter. As LaRue struggles to reintegrate himself into society, he is beset on all sides by bizarre creatures, from his filthy, Tourette's syndrome-afflicted roommate to a 6-foot-tall sex monster with whom LaRue inevitably does the deed. Keenan, who now lives in New York, will be at screenings of Love God during the PFWC, and will be back in town in July for PhillyHOVERGROUND, a three-week-long theater/art/dance/music/film festival.

Describe LaRue.

LaRue is a bull in a china shop. I have a couple of friends who are diagnosed schizophrenic and are on the pills to prove it, so I knew he had to have those manifestations, seeing things, hearing voices, and so on. But I also knew that in the end, we find out that, as he keeps saying, he's not crazy. A lot of times just the world makes us crazy.

The movie uses a lot of heavily processed footage and digital effects. Did you have any idea what the finished product was going to look like?

God, no. When we shot it, we all knew it was going to be wacky, from the script and from the technology they had on the set, but no one had any idea how it was going to turn out.

How was it shooting the "monster fuck" scene?

I went nuts on that monster! There's a lot more footage that they didn't put in. I had anal sex, and I did this whole two-minute thing where I licked it up and down. I pulled it all out just to give them something to choose from. I was surprised that they didn't use too much of that footage, but it may have looked too sick, even for Love God.

Did you attend any horror conventions for Tromeo and Juliet?

I've gone to a couple, one for Fangoria magazine. Troma is really amazing, one of the oldest and most active independent studios in the world, and they get all the press. I was thrown into this weird horror cult-movie spotlight. The first convention I went to, I had to sign autographs, and it was just too weird. I had to sign friends' names, my mother's name. It totally exceeded my expectations.

Love God: Saturday, May 2, 10:30 p.m., AMC Olde City 2; Tuesday, May 5, 9:45 p.m., Ritz at the Bourse.

-Sam Adams

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