Rob Lowe: Who allowed your future king to lose his hair?
ROB LOWE’S latest role finds him playing a high-flying US cop who takes over policing of a Lincolnshire market town and is baffled by the locals.
In real life, the Hollywood star has experienced a similar level of culture shock over the fact that Britain’s future king is going bald and does not appear to be doing anything about it.
“Can we talk about William? The future king of your country let himself lose his hair!” said a disbelieving Lowe, responding to a Daily Telegraph question about whether he would consider himself more or less vain than British men. “British men set a low bar,” Lowe said. “Honestly, one of the great traumatic experiences of my life was watching Prince William lose his hair.
“He’s going to be the f------ king of England! And there’s a pill! The first glimmer that a single hair of mine was going to fall out, I was having that stuff mainlined into my veins. And that’s what I did for the next 30 years.”
At the suggestion that the Duke of Cambridge may not be aware that men no longer have to put up with hair loss, Lowe replied: “No. But can’t someone make him?”
Lowe, 55, is about to become an unlikely ITV star as the lead in Wild Bill. He plays widower Bill Hixon, appointed chief constable of East Lincolnshire, moving from the United States to England with his 14-year-old daughter.
“I wanted to do something as far from a US network TV show as I could find – and Boston, Lincolnshire, was certainly that,” said Lowe of the series, which he called gritty but “also absurdist and funny”.
The comedy-drama follows Hixon’s attempts to integrate himself in the force and a community where the editor of the local paper (played by former Coronation Street actress Angela Griffin) is determined to turn the new arrival into “the Meghan Markle of Lincolnshire”.
It is hard to imagine a less likely place to see an actor whose career was launched in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and who went on to pin-up status as a member of the Brat Pack of 1980s Hollywood actors before a career renaissance in The West Wing. Along the way he dated Nastassja Kinski and Princess Stephanie of Monaco.
He developed a drink problem that led to rehab – he has been sober since 1990 – and his self-destructive streak reached its peak in 1988 with a sex tape scandal involving the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, a threesome and two fans – one of whom turned out to be 16 and therefore under age. Lowe never stopped working, and then Aaron Sorkin cast him in The West Wing (1999-2006), where his portrayal of a nerdy White House communications officer won him Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Discussing the Metoo movement, Lowe sounded a warning about the pendulum swinging too far the other way. “Think about An Officer and a Gentleman or Body Heat. Part of the thing was, ‘How real is real?’ And now we know that none of it is.” Married with two children, Lowe says his greatest vice now is junk food: “I find myself in the pantry at 3.30am eating Doritos and cheese strings, washed down by a Coke, and it’s everything I love: it’s secret, so satisfying, and a little self-destructive.”
‘Honestly, one of the great traumatic experiences of my life was watching Prince William lose his hair’