Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Emma Chance | TV | August 11, 2023
Rob Lowe talked with Penn Badgley about leaving The West Wing on a recent episode of the Podcrushed podcast.
“Whenever I talk to actors who complain about, you know, their relationships on their shows, it happens—it happens in any workplace,” Lowe said. “You could be in an environment where people sandbag you, want to see you fail, don’t appreciate you, whatever it is.”
He said of his stories from the West Wing set, “They would make your hair stand up, and there’s some of them I wrote. I shared some of them in my book, but I purposely didn’t share half of the other ones because it would make the people involved look so bad that I didn’t want to do it to them. So, I did not have a good experience.”
Word on the street was that salary was the issue when Lowe was written off the show in season 4, even though he joined the cast “as one of its highest-paid actors, earning about $70,000 per episode.” (Entertainment Weekly) He claimed, however, that it had become clear “that there was no longer a place for Sam Seaborn,” calling the breakup “amicable.”
Now he’s singing a different tune. He told Badgley that he made the connection between his experience on the show and his kids’ early dating experiences, noting that they “were getting to a certain age where I could see them having first girlfriends and being in a relationship that was abusive and taking it.”
“I walked away from the most popular girl at school, but I also knew that it was a super-unhealthy relationship, and it was the best thing I ever did.”
If someone as good looking as Rob Lowe can dump the popular girl, so too can all of us.
