The actors who Rob Lowe said “make me want to throw up in my mouth”
Considering his career could have been derailed by a sex tape scandal in the late 1980s (and a separate scandal involving a former nanny in 2008), Rob Lowe has been incredibly lucky to keep his head above water.
A teen heartthrob in a decade when they were all the rage, he’s managed to stay relevant when so many of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. Sure, he might not have made a decent movie for a while now, but that’s an entirely different argument.
If there’s one complaint that people might have with Lowe’s career, it’s that his movies aren’t exactly what you’d describe as ‘serious’, with his famous films from the 1980s mostly all silly comedies revolving around him trying to have sex with someone. He has branched out into drama over the years, most notably on The West Wing, but his aura is still that of a clown, a very successful one, but a clown nonetheless.
This label doesn’t seem to bother him, though, as he revealed when speaking on his own podcast, Literally! With Rob Lowe, which saw the former ‘Brat Pack’ star discussing his fellow thespians who took themselves incredibly seriously, and he wasn’t a fan.
“I can’t tell you how many actors… ‘Well, the thing about my character is I just lost myself, and I, my wife, didn’t even let her look me in the eye for six months’,” he said, mocking performers who ‘lose’ themselves in their work, “That’s now the fashion, and it just makes me want to throw up in my mouth.”
The gateway into this conversation was Marlon Brando. Lowe’s podcast guest, the journalist and news anchor Connie Chung, mentioned how “self-loathing” he had towards the art of acting, but it’s not entirely clear what she means by this.
Did Brando loathe acting because he didn’t think it was worth it? Or did he loathe it because his legendary style of method acting forced him to put in so much hard work? He once referred to movies as “commercialised glop”, yet famously went to extreme lengths to perfect his characters in films like On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, just one of the many contradictions that make Brando such a fascinating subject.
Chung had been comparing her male colleagues in the newsroom to the self-aggrandising actors that she despised, while pointing out how Lowe didn’t fall into this trap, which he took as a great compliment. “The self-aggrandising characteristics that you were telling me about that some actors and some actresses suffer from is, it does make you want to throw up,” he reiterated, “But it’s the same in my business.”
Lowe’s comments on method actors and overly pompous performers are part of a larger debate surrounding the profession, where performers walk a fine line between the confidence needed to succeed and the arrogance that can hold them back. While there are some who would praise those who go to great lengths to push the craft forward, I think we can all agree that the world would be a much better place if everybody took themselves a bit less seriously.
