Rob Lowe covers the new issue of GQ, the October issue. Ryan Reynolds has a cover too – I covered that earlier. Lowe is promoting his new TV show, The Grinder, with Fred Savage. It looks like a sort of stupid show and when I watched the promo for it, I was like, “Really, Rob? This is what you wanted to do?” I bring that up because Rob has history of being somewhat difficult, especially on long-running TV shows. There was a lot of drama on The West Wing, and then again on Brothers & Sisters. GQ asked Rob about that stuff and more. And he sounded like a cocky douche. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

The Brat Pack: “In 1985, right before St. Elmo’s Fire opened, New York magazine labeled Emilio, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Judd Nelson, and me ‘Hollywood’s Brat Pack.’ It was hard. We were totally minimized—like we were indistinguishable pretty people. But the irony was, it ended up being a piece that was too hip for the room. The snark was completely lost on the rest of the country. Everybody just thought it was fucking great. You know, I’ve had Peyton and Eli Manning come up to me and play scenes from St. Elmo’s Fire. I’ve had Gwyneth Paltrow play scenes from St. Elmo’s Fire. So after years of that, I’m down with the Brat Pack.”

Leaving The West Wing: “When I left The West Wing [after contract talks broke down in the fourth season], I remember Martin Sheen taking me aside and saying, ‘Boy, I sure hope you know where you’re headed with this. I mean, man, you’d better have Steven Spielberg offering to put you in a movie.’ I was like, ‘Well, no, I don’t.’ But look, I love a negotiation where they make it really easy for you. I love it when it’s like a ‘take it or leave it’ that’s insulting. In the end, I could have lived with the fact that everyone on the show had gotten a raise but me—if I felt that we really knew what the story lines were going to be. One writer on the show told me he was in a meeting in which they told him to write whatever he wanted. He goes, ‘I want to write a story about Sam Seaborn going back to Ohio to deal with his father who has Alzheimer’s.’ The response: ‘You can write for anybody but him.’ I’m not even sure that it was Aaron Sorkin who said it. Aaron may know nothing about it.”

The West Wing was grueling: “…And I loved The West Wing. But man, it was grueling. We shot near the Friends stage, and we would roll in at, like, 6 in the morning, and the ‘friends’ would come in, in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis, like, at 11:30 a.m., and by midnight they would have shot their show. They’d be gone and we’d be there until 6 in the morning. The sun would rise. That would never happen in TV today. Never. They’d never pay for the overtime. It was a moment in time, both in terms of the economics of the business and how successful the show was. Aaron had the kind of latitude to do it. It will never be done again.”

Why he quit Brothers & Sisters: “I left Brothers & Sisters when they ran out of storytelling runway. I mean, there are so many family dinners you can do. I eventually had to go to them and say, ‘Look, I don’t do spatula work. I don’t do scenes with oven mitts. If you’re looking for that, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not doing scenes about casseroles. It’s not happening.’ ”

[From GQ]

As a West Wing loonie, I can safely say that the show got SO MUCH better once Rob Lowe left. Maybe it was the Sam character, maybe it was the writing, maybe it was Rob’s performance, whatever it was, the show got better. So while I’m not mad that he left that show, I do think he could probably find another way to talk about it? As for Brothers & Sisters, I never watched that show but it’s sort of in the title that it’s going to be about family and dinner table scenes and stuff. And why the ‘tude about that? Why is it “I don’t do spatula work”? Because Rob Lowe is somehow “above” telling stories about family drama? But he’s not above a stupid show like The Grinder?

Photos courtesy of Peggy Sirota/GQ.