Details Magazine









 AN INTERVIEW
With Rob Lowe
By Bill Carter
Photos By Tom Munroe
May, 2004

"You're even more handsome," says the middle-aged woman, sticking her face between our heads to get the best possible look at those electric-blue eyes, in real life!" Rob Lowe, in real life, is sweetly gracious. "You're so nice to say that," he says winningly.

Looking like he does -- 40 years old, trim, just a few traces of lines around his eyes, rich brown hair falling lankly over one brow -- he's had plenty of practice at this sort of thing. Everyone in the restaurant at the racquet club halfway between L.A. and his home in Santa Barbara takes notice when he walks in, and even those who don't know who he is know for sure that a guy who looks like this has to be somebody.
Being acknowledged in this way seems to be on Lowe's mind. He remarks, for example, that it was fun to watch his co-stars on The West Wing find out what it's like to be famous, whereas "I've had to deal with various levels of recognition since I was 15."

He ruefully notes that the fiftyish woman who stopped by our table at lunch is pretty typical of whom he's wowing with his looks these days. "I can't remember the last time a 16-year-old said, 'I love you.' I think, like, one girl has said that because of The West Wing. And that was Ken Burns' daughter, so it almost doesn't count."

It truly has been a long ride for Lowe, who started acting at 8, had a TV series at 15, broke out in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders at 18, and signed on for full membership in the Brat Pack in his early twenties with films like St. Elmo's Fire and About Last Night . . .

Ah, but that was then. It's clear from his pre-occupations that this is an actor in transition. Lowe is looking for the role that will cement his status as a leading man for the next decade. He thought he had it when he signed on to The West Wing five years ago, but that all went sour in a dispute that seemed to be about money but really was more about status and expectations and self-image. (Lowe doesn't watch The West Wing anymore, though he often catches the repeats on Bravo -- his TiVo automatically records anything he has been in during his entire career.)

Last fall he jumped into another NBC series, called The Lyon's Den, a star vehicle for him, which blew out after just five episodes. A remake of the Stephen King classic Salem's Lot, in which is he the headliner, is coming in June on the cable channel TNT. And after deciding to sit out the TV cycle for a year, Lowe then agreed to start in a pilot for CBS tentatively titled Dr. Vegas. He plays a casino-hotel doctor who handles cases such as potential suicides who have blown their children's college funds at the craps table. "I feel like Al Pacino in Godfather III," Lowe says. "Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in."

It was only after he signed on that CBS became excited about the project and secured it in a place on the schedule. Even after his departure from The West Wing and the quick failure of The Lyon's Den, Lowe remains the kind of name networks see as having the juice to "open" a series.

"Rob Lowe is a legitimate television star," says Leslie Moonves, CBS's chairman and CEO. "He was a big plus to West Wing in its heyday. Casting does one of three things. It leaves a show the same, lowers your expectations, or heightens them. In this case with Rob Lowe, our expectations are really heightened."

Lowe is even in transition as a political activist. After years of dedicated Democratic politicking, he was an ardent backer of Arnold Schwarzenegger during his Republican coup d'etat in California last year. The onetime campaigner for George McGovern and Michael Dukakis declares himself fed up with party politics and is simply focusing on issues now.

He is as earnest about his career as he is about his causes (like clean water for California). This has everything to do with his long struggle to be taken seriously, the same syndrome that afflicts pretty women: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. He talks a lot about his commitment to being a good actor, how hard he works at it.


He is proud to have been in The Outsiders, for example, because of the rigorous auditions Coppola staged: hours and hours of readings in front of a mob of up-and-coming star boys including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Willie Aames, Mickey Rourke, and Scott Baio. "I had always hoped that the best actors got the parts," Lowe says, "but in that case, I know the actors with the most guts got the parts. Because there were flaming wrecks everywhere."

The Outsiders was a launch pad for the youthquake that hit Hollywood in the eighties, and it changed Lowe's life. He turned 18 on the set, dropped out of UCLA, and was off and running in a life he found intoxicating. "You've got your own hotel room and you can't believe it. You're getting room service, and you can't believe that. There are girls behind barricades, and you really can't believe that." Two years later St. Elmo's Fire, the definitive yuppie-manifesto movie, lit the fuse. "I'll tell you how I know I've been around a long time," he says, "Gwyneth Paltrow can recite every line of St. Elmo's Fire. I'm not kidding. She's seen it like 100 times. She likes to mortify me with obscure St. Elmo's Fire dialogue."

If you had to guess whom Lowe calls his model, it might not come to you right away, but it makes perfect sense: Paul Newman. "He was everything it meant to be a movie star," he says, "and actor. "But Rob Lowe has not quite had Newman's career, in either category, though he once seemed to have a shot at it. He has been up and down several times, surviving some bad choices, professionally and personally.

He admits to making an unfortunate decision after About Last Night . . . , when he picked a romantic comedy by director Peter Bogdonovich that turned into a "train wreck" called Illegally Yours. Then, of course, there was the infamous videotaped tryst at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which scarred his reputation and made it seem for a time that he would never be bankable again as a romantic leading man.

But if his sentence hasn't been completed, Lowe wants time off for good behavior. "When you're 40 years old and in the ensuing years you've done Austin Powers and Wayne's World and The West Wing, you've gotten married, and you're 14 years sober and have two children, 8 and 10, it would be a little surprising," he says, summing up for the jury, "if people still cared about something you did in your early twenties."

Five years ago, Lowe was looking for another movie script when his agent told him he had something good called The West Wing. Only when Lowe picked up the script did he discover that Aaron Sorkin, who was coming off the films A Few Good Men and The American President as well as the critically acclaimed ABC comedy Sports Night, had written it. "I went, Oh, wow!" Lowe says.

And then he started reading. The script opened with Sam Seaborn in bed with a prostitute, and Rob Lowe fell in love. "Liam Neeson once said to me, 'If the day ever comes, if someone writes who you are right now, it's all over.' So I read this and I thought, Holy shit, this is it. I don't know if ever in my life I had read a character when I went, I'm the guy. There just isn't anybody else who'll be able to do what I can do with this guy. It's my life."

The writing was so good, Lowe says, "it was like being hit over the head with a fucking mallet." He arrived on the Warner Bros. lot for the audition early on a Saturday. I'm in a suit. I decide I'm going to do the whole package. I'm the guy. I'm not fucking around. I'm the guy." His scene included a long soliloquy; ending with a line Lowe delivered so perfectly the room exploded in laughter. "Half an hour later I had the part," he says. "The West Wing audition was one of the great 20 minutes of my life. I had gotten to a place where all I wanted to do was give my best. So I destroyed it in that room."

It's only a bit of a stretch to say that it was all downhill from there. Lowe scoped out the rest of the cast and had little doubt that this was an ensemble show with one figure a few steps out in front: Sam Seaborn. The character of the president, he was told, was not going to be a major part of the show. "It was described to me that he would be like the neighbor in Home Improvement," he says. "He'll be there, but he won't really be there." Lowe heard that Sidney Poitier might be in line for an occasional appearance as the president.

Then Martin Sheen walked in the door. "And Martin was so unbelievably powerful," Lowe says. "Now it's going to be a show about the president and his interaction with his staff." Lowe still had top billing: STARRING . . . ROB LOWE.

He was also being paid more than anyone else in the cast. To Lowe, his salary agreement was already a concession. "I made a deal that was a cut rate for my quote," Lowe says with a burst of passion. "A huge cut -- $25,000 per episode from my quote. That was the deal I had on West Wing. So lest anyone tell you I was living like Donald Trump . . ."

 Money did become a factor, but not right away. The issue of star power flared up first. "Rob still wants to be the leading man," says a longtime production executive involved with the show. "He had a thing about the way he traveled and the kind of limo he would have. Things they do for movie stars but we don't really do in TV. He thought he was still the box-office champ."

Lowe says all he cared about was that he had "the part of a lifetime." He was not at all unhappy about the ascension of Sheen. "I didn't really care because the show was a hit. And Aaron is a great writer and it was a great cast. And I was so happy for Martin because I've known him all my life." (That is no exaggeration. Early in his career, Lowe lived in what sounds like a neighborhood gerrymandered for hot acting talent. He was only a few doors down from Sheen, and he hung out with Sheen's son Estevez, along with his houseguest, Cruise, who was bunking there because he didn't have a place in L.A. yet.)

Still, Lowe noted some "very, very ominous signs" in that first year of The West Wing. Sam wasn't getting much to do, so Lowe harangued Sorkin, who responded with an episode that featured crises over Sam's father's infidelity. "I said to Aaron, 'If you write me one like this a year out of 22 episodes, I'm happy'." It didn't happen. "Aaron will read this," says Lowe, "and he'll blow a gasket, but he and I agree to disagree about this." (Sorkin, who himself has moved on from The West Wing, says he simply does not want to discuss what happened between him and Lowe on the show.) It seems that Lowe and Sorkin also disagreed about Lowe's character's getting laid, which has been pointed to by many of the show's female fans -- and even NBC executives -- as the most startling omission in the storytelling of The West Wing, given Lowe's matinee-idol status. Simply put, women like looking at this guy.

Before his marriage he was linked with everyone from Natassja Kinski to Princess Stephanie of Monaco, but apparently the character he played couldn't get a date unless he paid for it. "There was a time when I thought that they were setting Sam up to come out of the closet," says Lowe. "That could be the only possible explanation."

Lowe says the show's fans and the network wanted to see more of Sam Seaborn. "It's true," says Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, who confirms, that he urged Sorkin to use Lowe more. But even with what Lowe calls "the spin from the other side trying to make me look like an egotistical actor counting screen time," he swears he would never have quit the show if he had been treated fairly. And by that he means -- doesn't it always come down to this -- money.

The facts, according to one production executive, are that Lowe was making a out $90,000 an episode while the rest of the cast were scuffling along at about $30,000 to $40,000 an episode. (Sheen had made it to the big time: $150,000 to $200,000 per.) And then, after a sick-out, the other cast members got raises to match Lowe's salary. "I just believed that if you're playing for a team and the team gets to the World Series, and everybody gets rewarded but you, they're sending you a message," says Lowe. "I'm not stupid. I immediately prepared to leave."

First there was a discussion with Sorkin, of course. "I called Aaron to say, 'What are we gonna do'?" Lowe remembers. "I want to play this part till I'm 50. I don't want to go. But I'm not going to be able to look myself in the mirror if I stay here when they have rewarded everybody but me'."

Sorkin was receptive, agreeing that it was a mistake to "break up the Yankees," according to Lowe. "At that point I'd reconciled myself that the part wasn't going to get any bigger. But it was still good, and if I was treated fairly I would stay, because good parts are hard to come by. When you're in the Beatles, you're lucky if Wings is next." No new offer was forthcoming, however, and when Lowe's lawyer asked that he be let out of his five-year contract a year early, there was no objection. His good-bye was barely acknowledged on the show. (Sam left to run for office in California.)

At least the news was announced in the real world with some fitting fanfare. Lowe was in the gym on the Warner Bros. lot when Wolf Blitzer interrupted the news on CNN, playing on the TV in front of the room, to read a bulletin saying Lowe was leaving The West Wing.

He finally, if not quite the way he'd planned, had his leading-man moment.





Return To Index