The ObserverRob Lowe This article is more than 14 years oldInterviewThe trouble with being Rob Lowe
This article is more than 14 years oldElizabeth DayRob Lowe was the ultimate 80s heartthrob – until the sex scandals, drink problem and rehab. Then came The West Wing, and now Ricky Gervais's latest comedy. So has he finally come of age?Rob Lowe announces his presence as he walks into the hotel bar by shouting across the room to order his coffee. "What I need is a double ESPRESSO!" Lowe bellows with such force that the windows seem to rattle. "With some steamed milk ON THE SIDE!" He seems to crave attention, although we are the only people in the bar. The barman scuttles away obligingly.
Lowe eases himself into a semicircular leather chair with a rubbery smile on his face. "IT'S MY ACTOR'S VOICE!" he yells at me before segueing seamlessly into an explanation of how he learned to project his voice during a recent stint in the London stage production of A Few Good Men. And then, realising that I am British, Lowe switches on the charm. You can almost see him mentally turning the sincerity dial up to 11.
"I love London," he says wistfully. "I just bought a coffee-table book of great London restaurants, and I read it and it made me so homesick."
Homesick? How long was he there for?
"I lived there for six months," he continues smoothly. "Even though it was only six months, it felt like home. We lived in Belgravia – it was beautiful. On Eaton Terrace," he says, enunciating the street name slowly, as if speaking to a foreign taxi driver. "I said to my wife: 'If we are going to do this we are going to do it right.' I lived the life out of… ah… ah… who's the Notting Hill director?"
Richard Curtis?
"That's it. I lived a Richard Curtis life."
At the age of 45, he is wearing a Springsteen-esque grey T-shirt patriotically emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and faded blue jeans that are a shade too stonewashed. He has three chunky beaded bracelets that resemble something a gap-year student would pick up from a Kathmandu market stall.
Perhaps these outward manifestations of youthfulness are not entirely surprising for an actor who was catapulted into the limelight when barely out of his teenage years with roles such as Billy, the saxophone-playing rebel with big hair and a crucifix earring in 1985's St Elmo's Fire. For many of us who grew up in the 1980s believing that leg warmers were the height of fashion, Rob Lowe epitomises the edgy-but-handsome leading man, the bad boy every girl wants to reform.
For much of his career, Lowe was defined by his looks, and yet he has never quite grown into them. He lacks the grizzled charm, the lived-in creases of his near-contemporary Sean Penn. He is still excruciatingly pretty, but his features are so perfect that they appear slightly absurd.
His early roles in films such as Francis Ford Coppola's coming-of-age classic The Outsiders (1983) and the 1984 comedy Oxford Blues made him into a pin-up. The next year, St Elmo's Fire cast Lowe as a shiftless frat boy and ladies' man alongside a new generation of stars including Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson. Lowe became the 1980s poster boy, partying hard with his co-stars and dating the requisite beautiful women, including Nastassja Kinski and Princess Stephanie of Monaco. He also developed a drink problem and a rumoured sex addiction that led to rehab. "I wouldn't wish it [the attention] on anybody," he says now. "It's confusing when you're young and you don't really know your own identity."
It all imploded in 1988. While campaigning on behalf of Michael Dukakis at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, Lowe picked up two female fans in a nightclub and took them back to his hotel, where he filmed them having a threesome. A year later the mother of one of the girls (who turned out to be 16 and therefore underage according to state law) pressed charges against Lowe. Would he make the same mistakes if he lived his life again, knowing what he knows now? "I would do everything the same." There is a silence. Why? "If you go back in time to try to change things, you could end up changing the future, and I like where I am in my life. I love my life, I'm really grateful for the things I have, and if I did something different it wouldn't turn out this way."
The case was settled out of court, Lowe did community service, and the video became one of the first commercially available sex tapes, distributed for £25 a throw by the porn baron Al Goldstein. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream roles dried up.
For a while Lowe appeared in smaller films before a stint on Saturday Night Live introduced him to comedian Mike Myers. Discovering a hitherto untapped gift for comedy, Lowe appeared alongside Myers in Wayne's World (1992) and was later cast in two Austin Powers films. He says he feels proud of his "body of work". "I think I'm able to move between romantic guys and people who are more cut from common cloth."
But it was his role as the White House deputy communications officer Sam Seaborn in The West Wing that cemented Lowe's post-St Elmo's reputation. His portrayal of the terminally idealistic and quick-witted Seaborn proved to be one of the highlights of the TV series, which ran from 1999 to 2006. According to West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, Lowe's audition tape for the role of Seaborn "left our jaws on the floor".
Lowe admits now that part of the attraction was playing a role that more or less ignored his appearance. "Sam was a nerd and never got the girl. Ever."
Except when his character slept with a woman he later found out to be a call girl? "Yeah, in the first episode. In four seasons, I kissed a girl once," he says rolling his eyes. "How about them apples?"
Although he played a Democrat in West Wing, he turned right-wing for his role as Republican senator Robert McAllister in Brothers & Sisters. It is a political trajectory that has mirrored his own – once a card-carrying Democrat, Lowe campaigned to make Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California in 2003.
"You know, there's that great quote: 'If you're young and you're not a liberal, you have no heart. If you're older and not a conservative, you have no brain.' I started out being a really, really liberal Democrat. [That changes] as you get older and you have children and you get more life experience. I'm what you would call an independent moderate. I haven't crossed the aisle, so to speak."
Would he like to follow Schwarzenegger into real-life politics? "I've gotten to believe it's more fun to play politicians than actually be them," he says. "I've been lucky enough in The West Wing and Brothers & Sisters to talk about the issues that are important to me with none of the awful mud-slinging or public scrutiny you have in politics."
His latest film, The Invention of Lying, is a return to comedy. Directed and written by Ricky Gervais, it is set in a world where people are incapable of not telling the truth. Lowe appears as Gervais's shallow and self-satisfied love rival for the affections of Anna (Jennifer Garner), a man who prides himself on his genetic superiority.
"It's a deconstruction of the cinema archetype of the good-looking prick," Lowe explains. Does he enjoy poking fun at his own reputation for disproportionate handsomeness? "In comedy you have to be willing to not take yourself seriously, you know? I take comedy really seriously and so to take comedy seriously, you must not, you cannot, ever take yourself seriously."
And yet he seems not to realise that he does take himself extremely seriously, even when the subject matter is ripe for fun. "I saw People magazine had a list of the top 10 teen idols of all time, and I'm on that list with Elvis, with James Dean, Michael Jackson," he says at one point. "I mean, I have to say I'm proud of that. It's cool." He pauses, as if better to appreciate the monumental nature of this achievement. "And there's some of the new guys on it like Robert Pattinson, Zac Efron… Those guys are carrying on the mantel."
The mantel of what exactly? The mantel of defined jawbones and tight trousers?
He seems to have become so used to acting the part of Rob Lowe that he speaks as though he is playing the role of charming interviewee, talking in a mixture of fortune-cookie homilies and beauty-pageant answers. "I'm a people person," he insists with a glossy smile that does not reach his eyes. "I enjoy meeting people and I enjoy interacting with humanity." Later, when I ask him if he is scared by his own mortality (his mother died from breast cancer five years ago), he replies: "I really, really try to live for today. It's one of my main goals: to try and live in the now. It's why I love the theatre; it's why I love golf, because it's a discipline. In your golf game if you're not in the now, you suck. Theatre, it's the same thing. If you let up for a second, you're dead. It's a metaphor for life. It's a muscle: you have to practise living in the present."
He seems not really to engage beyond this therapy-speak or, indeed, to have any desire to do so. One is left with the impression that he has been told so frequently that he is charismatic and hilarious that he no longer feels he has to make an effort.
Lowe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. His parents – father Chuck, a lawyer, and mother Barbara, a former high school teacher – split up when he was four. At the age of eight, Lowe saw a theatrical production of Oliver! and decided he wanted "to be one of those kids up there [on stage]". His mother remarried, then divorced again when Lowe was 12. Her third husband was a therapist who worked in Los Angeles, so Rob and his younger brother Chad moved to Malibu. It was a dislocating experience for Lowe, who did not surf and had never seen the ocean.
"The only thing you care about at that age is your friends, and I didn't have my friends any more," he says. "It didn't matter to me that it was sunny, it was Hollywood, there were palm trees and no snow. It was not an ideal move at all."
Yet life in California came with some compensations – at Santa Monica High School his contemporaries included Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr and the Sheens. He was friends with Cary Grant's daughter Jennifer. With such an impeccable Hollywood pedigree, it seemed only natural that Lowe would become a star (brother Chad also found minor fame as a TV actor, and for a time was married to Hilary Swank).
Lowe was 19 when Coppola cast him in The Outsiders alongside Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon, so the entirety of his adult life has been played out in the celebrity spotlight. In 1991 he married make-up artist Sheryl Berkoff, who had dated his best friend Emilio Estevez – all terribly incestuous in a glamorous, Hollywood sort of way.
Berkoff was instrumental in getting Lowe sober, and they now live on a ranch in Montecito, California with their sons, Matthew, who will be 16 this month, and 13-year-old John Owen. Does Sheryl ever get unnerved by the female attention that follows Lowe around like a swarm of bees? "Well, listen, we would never have been drawn to each other if she wasn't a great sport and didn't have an amazing perspective, and she continues to have that to this day. She's very secure with herself, and that makes it easy for me to go about and do what I do, and sometimes my work calls for me to hop into a bed and kiss a pretty girl." He makes a great show of shrugging his shoulders in an "aw shucks" kind of way to indicate that this is A Joke. Having children, he says, has made him more aware that "time is running away from me and that I will never, ever have these moments again. And there's going to come a time when they're not going to want to wrestle with me, and all of those things, so I really, really grab it while I can take it."
Apparently neither of his sons has watched St Elmo's Fire, which I imagine must rankle. "I can't get them interested in that," Lowe admits. "I say: 'Guys, you should see this!'" Did the absence of a constant father figure in Lowe's own life make him anxious about having children? "No, I was really eager to become a father." So does he think he is a good parent? "I like to think I am. I do know I'm very hands-on and very present."
He describes himself as sentimental: "You know what you say: you scratch a cynic and you find a sentimentalist. Because nobody's more cynical than me." Perhaps this cynicism stems from the actions of those around him. In April 2008 Lowe filed separate lawsuits against three former employees, including his children's nanny, Jessica Gibson. The cases were settled out of court in May. Did that experience make him wary of people? "No," is all he will say about this. "I'm just cynical about, er… You know, I've seen a lot in a short period of life. I know where the road is going almost before the road goes there." Is his cynicism a means of protecting himself from getting hurt? "I think so." He glances at me sideways, and for a second the smile slips. "I don't think it's conscious, but I'll buy that."
As it turns out, I am unable to pursue this line of questioning. A PR comes in to tell me that Lowe has to leave immediately for a premiere. I protest that no one had told me the interview would be so dramatically curtailed. Lowe stays silent. Later I'm informed by email that our interview was stopped because I had mentioned the nanny lawsuit. Apparently all journalists were meant to have been issued with a list of topics that were not to be discussed – except, of course, I was never given any such list. And even if he disliked the question, is it beyond the realms of credibility to assume that a 45-year-old man would be capable of saying he did not want to answer it?
To his credit, Lowe agrees to a catch-up phone interview. When we talk three days later, he sounds less stilted – maybe because I cannot see his face, he feels released from the necessity of Being Rob Lowe. Since our meeting Patrick Swayze, his Outsiders co-star, has died of pancreatic cancer. "He was like a brother to me," he says. The loss of his friend, an actor so indelibly associated with the same era as Lowe, seems to have made him reflective and prompts him to say something extremely telling: "One of the great gifts that we get [as actors] is that we live on, frozen in time, forever." Is that why he does it? "It is. Truly, the most fulfilling moments I've ever had are on the stage. If you can't have that as an actor, then you might as well at least have that other great thing, which is immortality."
There is something sad about this admission, as if he has never quite achieved what he wanted or been able to move on from the frozen celluloid image of himself at the height of fame. And perhaps, in the end, there is a small part of Rob Lowe that will forever be that teen icon, playing a saxophone in stonewashed jeans and a leather jacket, waiting for the glittering future to open up before him.★
The Invention of Lying opens on 2 October
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