Rob Lowe: ‘Nepo baby’ is the new ‘Brat Pack’: ‘I’ve been there for both of them’
He is brat.
Rob Lowe sees a similarity between the “nepo baby” and the “Brat Pack” labels — and can relate to both.
“It’s funny: I think the last time New York magazine coined a term as new and widely accepted and zeitgeisty as ‘nepo baby’ was probably when they coined the term the ‘Brat Pack.’ So I’ve kind of been there for both of them,” Lowe, 60, told Variety, in an interview published Thursday.
“I understand the curiosity and appreciate it, but I don’t have the same kind of intensity around it. Nobody thinks twice when your kid joins the family plumbing business, or becomes a painter or an architect or a dentist, or becomes a second-generation doctor,” he explained. “So I don’t really see the novelty of it, but I understand it.”
“Nepo baby” is a term that the outlet coined in 2022, referring to actors who had parents also in showbiz — such as Maya Hawke, Jack Quaid, Wyatt Russell, Kaia Gerber, or Rob Lowe’s son, John Owen.
“Brat Pack” is a term that the magazine also coined decades earlier, in the ’80s, referring to the group of actors in movies such as “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” including Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Andrew McCarthy.
As shown in the Hulu documentary “Brats” (now streaming), members of the “Brat Pack” had a fraught relationship with that term.
“It created the perception that we were lightweights, that we didn’t take it seriously,” Estevez said in the doc.
Referring to his two sons, John Owen Lowe, 29, an actor who stars in the Netflix show “Unstable” alongside Rob, and Matthew, 31, Rob told Variety, “I happily opened doors for Johnny in this business and my son Matthew, who’s an attorney. That’s what dads do, if they can. But the other side of it is — they’ve got to walk through the door. It’s like, you can get them on the team, but if they don’t put points on the board, they’re going to get cut.”
The “West Wing” alum shares his sons with wife Sheryl Berkhoff, 63, a former makeup artist who he’s been married to since 1991.
His son John also weighed in on the “nepo baby” label.
“I found personally that I had to face it head-on. Ignoring it didn’t feel true to form. It’s a very real thing — and I don’t want to speak to other people’s relationships to it,” he told the outlet.
“Everyone has their own and they’re entitled to it. But I know personally, if I were to come out and say, ‘Hey, this is something I don’t want to talk about,” or if I were to say something like, ‘Actually, it’s made my career harder,’ none of that is true. It’s not true in my experience, and I have to be honest.”
At the time that the “nepo baby” article came out, Bono’s daughter, “Bad Sisters” star Eve Hewson, tweeted sarcastically about it, while Kate Moss’s younger sister Lottie Moss had a since-deleted Twitter meltdown about it, saying in now-deleted posts, “So instead of being negative about other peoples success, go and try and create your own!”
Meanwhile, Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid’s son, “The Boys” star Jack Quaid, took it in stride, telling the Daily Beast in July, “I know that I work hard, and I know I’ve heard no way more than I’ve heard yes. But I also know that this industry is insanely hard to break into, and I had an easier time doing that than most. Both things can be true.”
John Lowe seemed to also take the label in stride.
“I hope that all people are looking for in that regard is self-awareness, because humility and gratitude seem to be the resolution for the emotional conflict I feel around that — because there is some and there always will be,” he told Variety.
“And I chose to write a show about it, and do a show with my dad. I made that bed, and I got to sleep in it.”
In the documentary “Brats” on Hulu, Lowe said, “There’s always going to be some perception that bumps up against how you see yourself. No one liked [the Brat Pack label].” He also called it “mean spirited” and “an attempt that was to minimize our talents.”
But, the “Parks and Rec” actor told Variety about the brat pack, “I look back at it with almost complete, 100% affection.”
Lowe added, “It feels kind of quaint. It’s such a specific moment in time, a moment in my life, a particular moment in terms of movies that people were making and were interested in.”
The former “The Outsiders” star added, “I’m super, super grateful that I got to be a part of it, and also super grateful that people are still interested and that we’re having this conversation about it, which is leading people back to watching those movies, which I loved being in.”
