Rob Lowe likes mixing it up
Actor has embarked on a US-wide tour to give fans insider access to his life
Rob Lowe loves his fans. A whole lot. So much, in fact, that he has embarked on a US-wide tour to give the people what they want: face time with the man himself.
The author of two best-selling memoirs, Lowe doesn’t shy away from discussing personal aspects of his almost 40 years in Hollywood. He plans to divulge even more when he swings by to perform what he calls a “third book onstage,” officially titled Stories I Only Tell My Friends: Live!.
It’s designed to please nosy parkers, which prompts the question: What does Lowe get out of this? Publicity, sure. The 54-year-old actor’s Parks and Recreation
co-star Rashida Jones once deemed him a “benevolent narcissist,” as he candidly wrote in his second memoir. But Lowe also shared — this time in a recent phone interview — that most of the artists he admires have been “able to share their authentic selves with their audience.”
“Whether it’s Bruce Springsteen in his work and his one-man show or the Joan Didions of literature, they have the ability to get honest, and get honest quickly,” Lowe says. “Not everyone can do it, and not everyone wants to do it. But to leave a mark with an audience, I believe that’s an absolute must.”
Lowe captivated viewers early in his career, skyrocketing to fame after starring in a string of commercially successful flicks in the 1980s. More than 30 years later, he keeps his career going by working on projects that span genres and mediums. He doesn’t appear to be too selective either, as he said before playing President John Kennedy in the 2013 made-for-TV movie Killing
Kennedy: “I am not a brand snob. I’m not. I don’t care if it’s on Lifetime.”
That statement has proved true — Lowe is directing and starring in a gender-swapped remake of the 1956 thriller The Bad
Seed, set to premiere on Lifetime in September.
This interview took place the day after the mid-April premiere of
Super Troopers 2, in which Lowe plays a Canadian mayor named Guy LeFranc — a far cry from his days as the dashing Sam Seaborn on The
West Wing. His upbeat Chris Traeger, of Parks and
Recreation, probably falls somewhere in between. We also can’t forget The
Lowe Files, a bizarre A&E series that followed the actor and his sons, Matthew and John Owen, as they travelled the nation in search of all things spooky. Before that, Lowe starred in the short-lived Fox series The Grinder and now appears in the CBS medical drama Code Black . Is he bored? Restless? Both?
Perhaps. Here, he circles back to his fans. “I’m interested in literature, so I want to write a book,” Lowe says. “I’m interested in theatre, so I want to do a one-man show. I’m interested in guilty-pleasure TV shows, so I wanted to do a version of Scooby Doo with my kids.
“There’s a reason why I’m still doing this. I think people like to see people try new things. And I think that’s one of the keys to navigating a long career — you know, experimenting and trying and delivering on new things.”
The stage show touches on most of those “things”: Lowe built it with the mind-set of a musician assembling an album. “You don’t want to have too many ballads, but you want to have some ballads. You’ve got to have the hits. People are coming for the hits! Is it too up-tempo?” And so on.
An early hit — the 1985 movie St Elmo’s Fire — cemented Lowe’s status as a member of the Brat Pack, a term pulled from a New York magazine story that described the 20-somethings who appeared in that film and/or The Breakfast Club. In his first memoir, he called the article a “sneak-attack, mean-spirited hatchet job,” but he acknowledges that the term has lost most of its negative connotation.
It is “gratifying and mortifying both to have your teens and early 20s memorialised forever on film,” Lowe says, but “you’ve got to talk about the Brat Pack.”
Lowe hasn’t publicised his political affiliation, but he notes that his West Wing character worked for a Democratic administration. After all, he says, you can’t make a show about the White House without picking a side.
“Aaron Sorkin is a Democrat, and we were all Democrats,” he says. But “it was not a partisan show. It was a show that celebrated our differences.”