Rob Lowe Aims High

by Natasha Wolff | July 29, 2024 4:21 pm

Since he found fame as a teen heartthrob in movies like 1983’s The Outsiders, Rob Lowe has been the subject of thousands of celebrity interviews. More than 40 years later, we still love The Outsiders[1]—a Broadway adaptation just won Best Musical at the Tony Awards—and we’re still interviewing Rob Lowe. (Note the story you’ve just started reading.)

But amid the many second acts of his career, Lowe, 60 and still a looker, has reversed the tables and become the interviewer.

On his popular weekly podcast Literally![2], Lowe goes toe-to-toe with subjects like Oprah Winfrey; his good friends Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr.[3]; Ed Zwick, who directed him in his 1986 breakout About Last Night; Netflix head Ted Sarandos; Arnold Schwarzenegger[4]; and Lowe’s own family members, including his wife, Sheryl, a jewelry designer, and their sons Matthew (a “civilian” who has a law degree and works in venture capital) and John (an actor with whom Lowe currently stars on the Netflix comedy series Unstable).

Lowe gets the most anxious when his family members appear as guests on the podcast. “I don’t know what to ask them. I don’t know what they’re going to do,” he explains. Non-Hollywood types like billionaire tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen also make him anxious. “I get nervous when I have super smart people on,” Lowe says.

“What I love about the podcast is it’s more about listening than questioning. You have to listen when you interview, just like when you act,” he says. “People are interesting, and if you follow what they’re saying, they’ll reveal a lot. You go down all the rabbit holes.”

Lowe says part of the reason he started the podcast was as an antidote to the often silly viral moments that come out of late-night television, like Carpool Karaoke or Lip Sync Battle. Lowe appreciates old-school interviews and old-school talent.

“I watch [old episodes of] The Tonight Show, and they were raconteurs. They knew how to be self-deprecating and charming. They knew how to land a joke,” Lowe says. Now, he explains, a talk show producer will call and ask something like, “Can you get in a go-kart with me?”

“I want to vomit in my mouth,” he says.

Lowe’s guests know he’s a “safe zone,” but he still wants his conversations to be “real, with ebbs and flows.”

“I’m not out there looking for salacious stuff, and I’m not looking to pile on,” he continues. “If I have Tom Brady[5] on my podcast, I don’t need to ask him about his divorce. There’s always more value in moving people away from the stuff that makes them uncomfortable.”

That said, Lowe admits: “I don’t think I’m a pushover. I make fun of my guests plenty.”

Despite having recorded more than 200 episodes, Lowe finds it’s easier to be interviewed than it is to interview.  Doing the podcast, “I have to have my producing and editing hat on, wondering, When is it time to move on from this subject? Is this getting slow? Is this getting boring?”

It’d be hard to imagine anything Lowe doing these days as boring. Sure, over the years he’s had plenty of clunkers—from dancing with Snow White at the 1989 Oscars to a handful of movies better left unmentioned—but he covered all that in his 2011 memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. We’re drowning in a sea of celebrity memoirs these days, but Lowe’s stands out as ushering in a new age of the Hollywood confessional.

“Of all the things that I’ve done, I choose my memoir over the best episodes of television I’ve made,” Lowe says, ranking it above canonical shows like The West Wing and Parks and Recreation. “The degree of difficulty and the upside versus downside is off the charts. You have to be authentic and honest. If you’re going to dance around things, you have no credibility.”

When Lowe started writing the book, “the celebrity memoir was dead. It was dead!” he says. “Now, when I talk to people in the publishing world, they say that Stories I Tell My Friends is the first thing they give to someone when they’re writing a book.”

In the memoir, Lowe dissects his bad-boy image, substance abuse problems and the decision to raise his family in Santa Barbara instead of Los Angeles. Looking at his career trajectory following the book’s publication, it seems now that the memoir may have exorcised any unnecessary self-consciousness and brought on the Golden Age of Lowe.

Lowe has long seemed to poke fun at his image (see Wayne’s World and Austin Powers), but stints on later seasons of Parks and Recreation, The Grinder (which lasted one memorable season on Fox in 2015) and now Unstable[6] have given us a Lowe that is admirably loose, a bit mischievous—even goofy. He seems to be having a great time.

“He’s an actor to his bones and also so, so experienced that his approach is always playful, always truthful and he always makes it look effortless,” says his Unstable co-star Sian Clifford, who stars as chief of staff to Lowe’s tech god Ellis Dragon, a kind of Elon Musk doppelganger. “He’s certainly shown me how to approach my work with a much lighter touch.”

Lowe believes that one of the tricks to a successful character-driven comedy is lots and lots of episodes, so he’s grateful that a second eight-episode season of Unstable drops on Netflix in August. He’d like to see much longer seasons, but “you can never argue with the mysterious [Netflix] algorithm. Still, one of the things I love about the show is it’s fun and has laughs and it still won’t take you as long to watch as The Irishman.” (That’s Netflix’s notoriously expensive Scorsese movie, which runs 209 minutes long.)

“You have to get to know the characters and you need to spend time with them,” Lowe explains of growing a sitcom. “It’s a proven fact that Parks and Recreation wasn’t even funny until the second year. It didn’t become Parks and Rec until episode 40! Eight episodes is not enough time to get to know characters. I stake everything on that. There’s a reason that people are liking season two of Unstable. They know the characters now. It’s a mathematical thing.”

The show also provides an opportunity to work opposite his son John, with whom he co-created the series. “He’s really coming into his own,” says Lowe. “As you go along, you learn the strengths of the actor, and we adjusted his character to make him less of a dweeb. The writing got crisper.”

The goal for Unstable, says Lowe, is “absurdist and heartwarming. Arrested Development is the North Star.” But it can’t all be absurd. “You have to care about the characters. If they’re not grounded, you’re watching a cartoon. At the end of the day, you don’t really care about Homer Simpson, but live-action comedy has to come out of real emotion and real conflict and real relationships and something you believe is plausible, even if it’s just barely sometimes.”

On top of Unstable and his podcast, Lowe is always working. “When I became an empty nester, I decided I could commit to more things.” In addition to the Fox series 9-1-1: Lone Star, he recently created a game show he sold to the network.

“It sounds really stupid, but the idea came to me in a dream,” Lowe says of the game show. “You’ve gotta keep yourself learning, and that’s how the spirit stays young. I love to work. It keeps me vital. I’m also aware of how few people are working into their sixth decade in this business, and you don’t get there by not working.”

At this point, there’s not much in Hollywood Lowe hasn’t done, and there aren’t many people he doesn’t know. “You’d have to dig pretty deep. The truth is, I can get anybody on the phone, and that’s sick. It’s amazing to do,” Lowe says. (It also makes booking his podcast a lot easier.) “But there’s always some new mandate or idea that Hollywood concocts that makes me have to learn or stumble.”

All that work means Lowe doesn’t have a lot of time to enjoy the other stuff his industry produces. “When I actually find something that compels me to watch from the beginning to the end, I want to weep,” he says, noting The Iron Claw and Saltburn as recent works that held his interest. “Though, here’s the problem: I liked Saltburn a lot more when it was called The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is one of my favorite movies.” Succession gets his gold star. “I’d give my fucking eyeteeth to be on a show like that,” Lowe says. “I’d be so down for Succession: The Musical.”

Until the Roys start singing on Broadway, we’ll have to be satisfied with The Outsiders, which Lowe has not yet seen.

“I’m flattered, though,” Lowe says, acknowledging the new generation that will get to experience S.E. Hinton’s “amazing” story. “How could you not be? I can think of so many movies or TV shows or moments that are lost to the mists of time five years later, let alone 40. To be a part of something for 40 years? Wow.”

Hair: Grooming: Jason Schneidman for Solo Artists at The Men’s Groomer Salon, Los Angeles
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Production assistant: Nathan Waters
Shot at the Corazza House in Los Angeles

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