Rob Lowe is a true veteran of the business. He was an 80's heartthrob thanks to movies like St. Elmo's Fire and About Last Night.
He's been in many network TV shows, including The West Wing, in which he played White House communications director Sam Seaborn. Younger fans may know Lowe as Chris Traeger, "LIT-erally" the most upbeat city manager ever in NBC's Parks and Recreation.
Now Lowe is wondering whether his most recent show, the Fox sitcom The Grinder, will be his last for a broadcast network. In the ratings-challenged series, Lowe played Dean Sanderson, an actor famous for playing a super slick lawyer in a sudsy drama, also called The Grinder.
The premise of the sitcom version of The Grinder is that Dean's show has been cancelled. So he heads home to Boise, Idaho, hoping to reconnect with his father and brother, played by William Devane and Fred Savage. They are real lawyers whose jobs are not exactly glamorous. Dean is convinced that the ploys that worked on his series can work in real life.
The sitcom The Grinder got a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it struggled to find an audience. When we sat down with Lowe, he was still awaiting word on the fate of the show, but he knew things weren't looking good. Despite its low ratings, the show had dedicated fans--several thousand of them have already signed a Change.org petition, urging a streaming outlet like Hulu or Netflix to pick the series up.
When he sat down with us, Lowe reflected on his long career in the industry, how deciding to be sober changed his life, and why he hates being called "a hunk."