Rob Lowe at 61: 'I Am Still That Fifth Grader in the Springtime'

"Look!” says Rob Lowe excitedly, pointing to a pod of dolphins jumping in the waves. We’re spending the morning in Lowe’s adopted hometown of Santa Barbara, California. Lowe, who surfs every chance he gets and lives just down the beach, has seen dolphins numerous times. But it turns out that the trademark enthusiasm he brings to many of his roles is true to life; you’d think this was his very first sighting.

It’s a rare day off for Lowe, who is recording episodes of his popular podcast Literally! With Rob Lowe, hosting Season 3 of Fox’s trivia game The Floor and working on his third book.

“I figured out how to write two books about me,” he jokes about his memoirs. “My wife likes to say, ‘No one likes talking about themselves more than you do.’ And I’m happy to admit to that.” The working title for Lowe’s next book is What Do I Know? A Guide to Living, which he hopes will land him in the self-help section of the bookstore. “It’s my truisms, what I found to work, what I found to not work, what I’ve observed, what I think,” he shares.

In addition to gaining time by the sea, he’s reveling in the chance to log quality time with his five pups. They arrive on leashes, guided by their trainer. “Your dogs love you no matter what the ratings are,” he deadpans. “She slept with us last night,” he says, giving his Jack Russell terrier Daisy an affectionate rub. (It is no coincidence he narrated the winsome 2024 Netflix documentary Inside the Mind of a Dog.)

Lowe burst onto the scene as Sodapop Curtis in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and continued to dominate 1980s coming-of-age films (St. Elmo’s Fire, About Last Night) to cement his place in Hollywood’s Brat Pack. Throughout the ’90s he worked on dozens of TV projects and other movies, with parts small and large (including in Wayne’s World, Contact and Austin Powers movies, among the better known). Then, in 1999, he pivoted to prestige television, earning Emmy and Golden Globe ­nominations for his role as Sam Seaborn in The West Wing.

Since then he has done a star turn in Parks and Recreation, voiced animated characters and given audiences an intimate look into his life through a one-man show, Stories I Only Tell My Friends: Live! More recently he has worked alongside the younger of his two sons, John Owen, to create and star in the eccentric comedy Unstable, which blurs the lines between the real and fictional father-son relationship, and played a firehouse chief in the Fox first responder drama 9-1-1: Lone Star.

At 61, Lowe still looks very much like the teen heartthrob America fell in love with in The Outsiders: His famously chiseled jawline is just as prominent, his piercing blue eyes still as welcoming. (Genes, yes, he says, but he also gives a shout-out to his decision to become sober 35 years ago.)

Meanwhile, his latest TV series—Unstable and Lone Star—were canceled last year, after two- and five-season runs, respectively. But once again, Lowe had already made a calculated shift, this time to become a game show host, first on the since-shelved Fox show Mental Samurai, and now on The Floor, which premiered its third season in February.

The gig—a trivia face-off show that begins with 100 contestants on set—is challenging. But Lowe has made it work. “I’m an air traffic controller, contestant whisperer-coach, scorekeeper and one-man show,” he says. “You have to do it all at once and make it look easy. I love it.”

When asked if he has purposely made himself uncategorizable, he suggests it’s more about staying in the spotlight. “Attention spans are only getting shorter,” says Lowe. “I’ve run into enough young people who don’t know who Paul Newman is, so I’m aware of how fleeting people’s memories can be.” And he has no plans to slow down anytime soon—retiring on a beach somewhere is definitely not in the cards. “I want to find new things that are continually challenging me and reintroducing me to people who might not have even been born when West Wing came out,” he explains. “Besides, I love trivia.”

And now for the rest of Rob Lowe’s life, via a dozen trivia questions:

(1) Where did Rob Lowe acquire his boyish Midwestern charm?

( ) Malibu (X) Dayton, Ohio ( ) Fargo

A: Lowe caught the acting bug at about age 10 when his parents took him to see a family friend in a Dayton production of Oliver. “It was an aha! experience,” he says. He auditioned and landed the lead in a play at the Dayton Playhouse, and that was that. “It’s a sense of being seen,” he says, “a sense of power and ability. I felt it the very first time I went on stage and got a laugh.”

Lowe took acting seriously, an interest uncommon in the Midwest in the 1970s. “I took a lot of grief for it,” he says ruefully. He sought ways to stand out and get ahead. At age 11, he was with his mother in a hotel lobby when he saw luggage tagged with Liza Minnelli’s name. Two years earlier she had won the Oscar for Cabaret. He persuaded the desk clerk to tell him her room number. “And I went up and knocked on her door,” he recounts. “Her husband, Jack Haley Jr.—the Tin Man’s kid!—invited me in, and I sat and talked with them. Liza ate chocolates and drank red wine in her white robe, and it was amazing.”

When he was 12, his family moved to Malibu, California, and he plunged headfirst into Hollywood. He went to high school with Robert Downey Jr., and the Sheens (Martin, Charlie, Emilio Estevez and the rest) were friends and neighbors. Lowe made his on-screen debut three years later in the 1979 sitcom A New Kind of Family. “It did not do well,” he concedes.

(2) True or false: Lowe almost quit acting before his career took off.

(X) True ( ) False

A: Lowe says he nearly walked away from Hollywood after Family flopped: “I thought I was done—couldn’t get a job.” But in 1982 came the audition for Coppola’s The Outsiders, which he describes as a “brutal, exhilarating process, where every actor from age 15 to 30 in New York and LA auditioned in front of each other, round after round, for weeks. I’ve never been a part of nor heard of anything like it since. Google ‘Outsiders auditions’ and see some of the video footage. It’s pretty incredible.”

With the 1983 release of The Outsiders came all the baggage of meteoric early success—perhaps spurred by the filming itself in some ways: Lowe recalls actors as young as age 15 being handed beers on set. In real life he plunged into his bad boy persona—abusing alcohol and drugs—and basked in the fame that fell upon those in the instantly fabulous Brat Pack, including Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson. In 1988, Lowe got caught up in a scandal when a sex tape surfaced showing the then-24-year-old Lowe having relations with two women, one of whom was underage. He said he did not know her age and ultimately settled a lawsuit with her family: No charges were filed. He’s grateful it didn’t occur in today’s cancel culture world, but says he also knew it was a wake-up call. In 1990, he checked himself into rehab after missing a call from his mother to tell him his grandfather had had a heart attack. He’s been sober since. “I have no regrets,” he says. “And I know how rare that is. I’m lucky.” (In fact, he’s been pleased to pay his wisdom forward: His son John Owen has now been sober for seven years. Says Lowe: “That he and I have been able to share that has been amazing.”)

(3) What gigs helped Lowe segue into comedic roles and then into dramas?

( ) SNL ( ) The West Wing (X) Both

A: On March 17, 1990, he landed a dream gig guest-hosting Saturday Night Live. “That went so well that I got invited into that world, and that led to Wayne’s World, Tommy Boy, Austin Powers, which led to my comedy career, which continues.”

Lowe then found his way into The West Wing from 1999 to 2003. He walked away over rumored tension and salary disputes, but today describes The West Wing as “seismic,” leading him directly to “my adult era.” This included notable roles in Brothers & Sisters, Parks and Recreation, The Grinder and 9-1-1: Lone Star.