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:

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.

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.”)

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.

A. “Literally.” It’s also featured in the name of his podcast and used by Lowe literally six times in his interview with AARP.

A: Lowe has done drama, romance, comedy and even reality television—on The Lowe Files, where he traveled the country with his sons to investigate unsolved mysteries.

He has not, however, turned his back on life before the ’90s. Last year he was happy to sit down with Andrew McCarthy for Brats, the critically praised Brat Pack documentary. And he has been cheering on Pack pal Demi Moore for her return to the spotlight with her Golden Globe– and AARP Movies for Grownups–winning turn in The Substance. But he seems just as excited to possibly reunite with her and other Brats on-screen for the long-anticipated sequel to St. Elmo’s Fire. “We made a movie that worked, exploring what we were like when we were 21,” he says. “Let’s see what we’re like when we’re 61.”

A: Lowe has been deaf in one ear for as long as he can remember. “I always am very careful about not wanting to lose that one good ear that I have,” he says. The only bummers are not getting to hear Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon in stereo “and that when I come into the house and I say, ‘Honey,’ my wife goes, ‘I’m here,’ and I have no idea where she is because I can’t hear where sound comes from.”

But he is also hypervigilant about fans approaching him. “I’m always worried that people are gonna think I’m standoffish because I don’t hear them,” he says.

A: Lowe has been married to Sheryl Berkoff, a successful makeup artist to the stars and later jewelry designer, for 33 years. The couple met on a blind date in 1983, had a fling, then reconnected on the set of 1990’s Bad Influence. (A movie, by the way, that Lowe says he’s “really proud of, ahead of its time, that people don’t talk about. If you haven’t seen it, go see it.”)

The secret, he says, is picking the right person—he’s quick to rattle off a list of things he loves about her: She’s “fascinating, puzzling, hilarious, entertaining, beautiful, sexy” and more. He stresses, though, that no relationship is perfect. “We both really work on it,” he says, revealing that the couple has leaned heavily into marriage counseling, though he doesn’t think they have necessarily needed it. “If you need it, maybe you waited too long. You get your oil changed in a car before you need it. Therapy is a life hack for us.”

A: Lowe lost his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother to breast cancer (and his father, now 85, is a lymphoma survivor). So he has been very active for the past 25 years helping to fight the disease, particularly as an advocate for research and early detection of breast cancer.

“It’s my way of honoring them and helping people really talk to their doctors about going into clinical trials,” he says, suddenly serious. “It feels like every decade there’s a new iteration of how I get to participate in the world to help people who are going through cancer, and it gives me a ton of satisfaction to help out.”

A: When Lowe’s first son, Matthew, 31, was born, a friend suggested he talk to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz for advice on getting on lists for elite LA preschools. Rob and Sheryl immediately moved the family to Santa Barbara, an hour and a half away from Hollywood. “I thought, I am not ever going to raise my kids in a world where I have to go to my agent to figure out how to get them into preschool,” he says. “That was literally the straw that broke the camel’s back, and we left.”

Lowe says he has loved raising his kids out of the spotlight: “I had a vision of myself coaching Little League, which I did. I coached everything I could. It was one of my favorite things I did as a dad. And I didn’t want to look over on the sidelines and have the head of NBC over there, who I’m waiting to hear from, whether they’re going to renew my show for the fifth season.”

He remains very connected to his children, having cocreated and costarred in Unstable with John Owen, 29, and working with Matthew on the finance side of Lowe-family business. “So I get to do the creative, entertainment stuff with Johnny, and then I get to do the business part with Matthew,” says Lowe.

Nonetheless, with the kids out of the house, Lowe and his wife have completely embraced dog parent life, with two Jack Russell terriers, two German shorthaired pointers and one mutt. “We treat them like kids,” he says.

A: Lowe is admittedly not very good at sitting still. If he does have a quieter day, “I sleep in, have my coffee in bed. I do my prayers and meditation. I spend some time with the dogs. I go to the gym. I’ll check in on business. If nothing is pending, I’ll go and play a round of golf or surf, and then come back for dinner with my wife at home, and then she’ll want to watch TV. I’ll go to the firepit and have a cup of coffee or something like that, and then off to bed.”

But Lowe is an irrepressible thrill seeker; it seems that since putting alcohol to rest, adrenaline is his drug of choice. “I am still that fifth grader in the springtime, barefoot, running around outside,” he admits. A few years ago, for instance, he was delighted to find out that in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, “if you ski over 100,000 vertical feet in a day, you make it on the leaderboard,” he says. He did it, of course, and plans to go back to repeat it—and to ski an infamous run, Corbet’s Couloir, a double black diamond surrounded by steep rock walls with a nearly vertical entrance, also known as “America’s scariest ski slope.”

He has also run in a lion-infested game park in the Serengeti (“Where humanity first ran,” he marvels, “super primal”) and cruised on a stand-up paddleboard over great white sharks at California’s Manhattan Beach.

“If I’m gonna go skiing, I’m really gonna do it. If I’m gonna surf, I’m really gonna do it,” he explains. “It makes my wife crazy.”

The current bucket list item? The final frontier, space: “Shatner did it. I’m definitely doing it.”

A: After Lowe turned 60, he sought the advice of a 70-year-old idol of his, who told him to keep being active but to “just dial it down,” since with age come injuries and longer recoveries. “So I promptly dialed it up,” he says. “He was absolutely right. Over Christmas I fell on a wave in Hawaii that I had no business being on and separated a rib—it still hasn’t healed.” Nonetheless, he says he leans into the wisdom imparted to him by none other than Clint Eastwood: “Never let the old man in.”

A: “I have a probably overly inappropriate interest in my sons’ love lives—because I’m angling for grandkids,” he says. “It better happen!”

For now, he’s toying with what name he’d like to be called, whether that’s Papa or something fancy like Opa. He suggests our readers call into his podcast with possible grandfather-y nicknames, maybe something fun like Mim, which he used to call his own grandmother.

“By the way, there’s never been a better AARP conversation than this, right?” he jokes. “Really, this is it.”