Rob Lowe names the most overlooked movie of his career: “It was really ahead of its time”
Rob Lowe has had some great parts in his career: a communications director in The West Wing, a juvenile frat boy in St Elmo’s Fire, a ruthless TV executive in Wayne’s World, the list goes on.
Hence, in an interview with AV Club, when Lowe was asked to reflect on a number of these famous roles, there was one character that came up entirely of his own volition as he felt it was the most overlooked thing he’d ever done.
“I’d say it’s probably Bad Influence,” he admitted, “It was a little company that released it, it was really ahead of its time… I’m really proud of it… It’s sexy. It’s weird. It’s dark. The characters are great. It was David Koepp’s first big screenplay. It was actually a writing sample that was around town to get David work at the time… But I’d say that would be the one I’d tell people to go and look at if they haven’t seen it.”
Released in 1990, Bad Influence is a psychological thriller from LA Confidential and 8 Mile director Curtis Hanson, which sees Lowe play a shady hedonist named Alex who takes a shy yuppie James Spader under his wing, and just as his apprentice is beginning to enjoy his newfound lease on life, the pair’s debauched activities catch up with them. However, it was made on a very modest budget of $7million and failed to set critical imaginations alight.
Ironically, despite singing its praises many years later, Lowe might have been the reason why Bad Influence flopped the way it did.
In real life, the star was just as wild as his character, drinking and abusing drugs, and once even getting into a fight with Tom Cruise on the set of a movie; however, his biggest scandal during this era involved a sex tape, which eerily mirrors a plot point from the film, with one of the other participants in the tape being 16 at the time Lowe was 24, which was above the age of consent in the state of Georgia, but below which someone could be filmed having sex, thus leaving a black mark against Lowe’s name and, by proxy, anything he was involved in.
It wasn’t a completely wasted effort, though, as Lowe mentioned, this was the project that launched the career of screenwriter David Koepp, who had another hit two years later with Death Becomes Her, before delivering the script that would launch him into the stratosphere: Jurassic Park.
Koepp has been a key part of the franchise ever since, and outside of dinosaur-based terror, his other works include Spider-Man, Panic Room, and Mission: Impossible, with his movies grossing a total of over $2.6billion, the fourth most of any screenwriter in history.
Bad Influence also had a positive effect on Lowe’s personal life, as it was on this set where he met Sheryl Berkoff, a make-up artist whom he would go on a blind date with years later, and within a year of that, they were married, and have been together ever since; no wonder he remembers the film so fondly.
