Things About The Former Teen Idol Only Superfans Know

It's impossible to get much more inoffensive than the pop music of a young Shaun Cassidy, and as for his stint as Joe Hardy? That's not exactly the stuff of R-rated television. And that, he told Entertainment Weekly, was by design and, it was also why people were shocked when he headed up the

It's impossible to get much more inoffensive than the pop music of a young Shaun Cassidy, and as for his stint as Joe Hardy? That's not exactly the stuff of R-rated television. And that, he told Entertainment Weekly, was by design — and, it was also why people were shocked when he headed up the creepy cult classic "American Gothic."

"I've always had a dark side," he explained. "But the image that everybody was pushing was the lighter one. And early on, I was conscious of keeping the darker stuff in check, because I felt like Santa Claus to a lot of kids. I was an 18-year-old young man who had this audience that was 10 years younger. Children."

Cassidy said that he had always wanted to write, and admits that he was a bit of a pest when it came to changing dialogue on "The Hardy Boys." And according to what he told the Los Angeles Times, he was able to explore something very personal in "American Gothic": "the duality of nature. The duality of people."

What was it that attracted Cassidy to writing? Acting, he told the LA Times, was all about bringing someone else's vision to life, and while each individual actor — on the screen or in the theater — could definitely bring their own take to the job, he wanted to be the one seeing his vision come to life.

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