A new Lowe from Rob

Rob Lowe makes his West End debut in the revival of A Few Good Men.

10 April 2012

God, Rob Lowe looks knackered. His blue eyes are smeared and filmy with tiredness - he moves with the stiffness of a man starved of sleep. For the past few weeks, the 41-yearold Hollywood star has been rehearsing like a dog for his West End debut in the revival of A Few Good Men.

He plays Lt Kaffee, a rookie military lawyer who crosses swords with the bigoted veteran in charge of the marines in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. It is a part - just to make things even more stressful - made famous by his ex-Brat Packer pal Tom Cruise in the 1992 film.

'There are 67 scenes and 170-plus pages. Lt Kaffee is off stage for four scenes,' Low assures me in his measured, emphatic voice. He cracks a smile from dry lips. 'But it's an amazing part. My experience with the play is it's really the best of both worlds. It's everything you love about the movie but, in my opinion, Kaffee is much funnier. I mean, it's not a comedy - let's be clear about that! It's about a court martial and prisoner abuse.'

For Lowe the big draw is being reunited with Aaron Sorkin, who wrote A Few Good Men when he was 28. Sorkin personally invited Lowe to take the lead role in London. More crucially for Lowe, he also yanked him from his career doldrums in 1999 by casting him as Sam Seaborn in the hit TV series The West Wing.

Suddenly Lowe was sought-after again - he even had tea with the Clintons. 'It was like being in The Beatles,' is how he summarises it. 'There's never been a show like it, that captured the zeitgeist of every aspect of the culture.'

But he left after four years because of creative differences. What went wrong? Lowe crosses his muscled arms diplomatically. 'I don't look at it so much as what went wrong as how did it go so right for so long? I think one of the useful things in life is to know when to leave the party. And it was hard work. We worked from 12 July to 8 May with a week off for Christmas, on a minimum 13 hours a day - a minimum.'

The star is chatting in the unlikely setting of the London Welsh Centre on Gray's Inn Road. His equally unlikely ex-Coronation Street co-star, Suranne Jones, is prowling upstairs in pigtails and a red dress. Lowe sits cautiously, legs extended, in a basement rehearsal room.

He has a smallish face, flat lips and the guarded containment of a man who has ridden the Hollywood bronco, gone through rehab, and been sober for 15 years. He is very like Cruise in his control and focus, though not unlikeable or totally humourless: a faint smile of pleasure lights his face when he makes me laugh.

It's almost two decades now since the Brat Pack star fell from grace, after filming a lesbian clinch between two girls, one just 16, in his Atlanta hotel room. He was 22 and campaigning for Michael Dukakis. The parents of the 16-year-old brought a lawsuit for which he settled out of court.

At once his career, hot from St Elmo's Fire, cooled. He seemed to vanish during the Nineties, though he disagrees with this interpretation. 'In 1994 I did what was then the biggest mini-series in like, the past 40 years: Stephen King's The Stand,' he points out. 'And Wayne's World in 1992, which was maybe the biggest box office of any movie I'd been in.'

He will concede the incident made him realise he was a 'functioning' alcoholic. Off he went to rehab in Tucson, Arizona. It was a bleak and lonely time: the only person who came to visit was Sheryl Berkoff, a make-up artist who had dated his Brat Packer friend Emilio Estevez. He married Sheryl in 1991.

They now have sons aged 11 and nine and live in a mansion in Santa Barbara, LA. Lowe's face literally lights up when I say the marriage seems genuinely happy.

'Indeed,' he agrees. 'I picked the right woman. She's unbelievably beautiful and she has tremendous energy and life force. And she's out of her mind!' He grins. 'She was probably the first person I ever met whose only agenda was supporting me utterly.'

I ask how he looks back on his career and he raises his hands. 'Listen,' he says. 'I'm a kid from Dayton, Ohio, who wanted to be an actor at a time when kids weren't actors, in a town where they certainly weren't actors, they were football captains, working at the factory, going to jail.'

His father, Chuck, still works as an attorney in Dayton. Lowe's mother, Barbara, was a highschool English teacher who wrote numerous novels that never got published. Lowe was badly hit by their divorce when he was four. His mother remarried twice more and, when he was 12, he moved with her from Ohio to Malibu, where he went to Santa Monica High with Sean Penn.

Ironically, his fall from grace 10 years later was the making of him. Lowe is a man who has worked on himself conscientiously.

'Though I think I would have been one of the least self-aware people you'd have ever interviewed previous to my "spiritual enlightenment" in 1990,' he points out grinning. 'I just wouldn't have anything I have in my life without not drinking.'

He grins again when asked if the Brat Pack really existed. 'Absolutely it existed,' he says.

'It was young, idealistic, fun, ambitious, serious, crazy actors being 19 to 22 years old together.

It was great! But these days I take things one day at a time. I try not to let events overwhelm me. One day at a time is the cornerstone of recovery. And, I tell you, it's the cornerstone, too, of playing flipping Lt Kaffee in the West End.'

A Few Good Men, previews from Thur 18 Aug, first night Tue 6 Sep, Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1 (0870 901 3356).

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