“I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.”--Rob Lowe, “Lowe, Actually,” Vanity Fair, May 2011The above quote is part of a section on the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Outsiders, which gave rise to the career of Rob Lowe and virtually an entire generation of actors. I can’t say that I’ve really been a Lowe fan before (and, if you want to know the truth, I’ve been a little suspicious of the guy after that X-rated video of him with a fan at the 1988 Democratic Convention surfaced).
But this reminiscence made me really feel what it must be like to feel your entire life riding on a single audition. It made me want to see The Outsiders, and even some of the rest of Lowe’s work. Maybe he‘s an intelligent artist rather than a guy simply trading desperately on his good looks. Maybe his memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, will answer the question definitively…
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