GROWING UP AS the child of a world-famous, universally beloved celebrity can be tough. There’s all kinds of attention on you, and you’re never quite sure if people want to be your friend or if they are just excited by the idea of proximity to stardom.
At least, that’s how John Owen Lowe, son of TV and film star Rob Lowe, felt as a young person. “The number of times I got compared to my dad, and the number of times he was brought up in conversation, made me so uncomfortable,” he told Men’s Health in our April cover story, in which he and dad Rob Lowe talk about working together on the new Netflix series Unstable.
And that was all before the awkwardness of finding out that his dad made a sex tape when he was 24, which, over the years, has been so widely discussed that it has now taken on the stature of a near-mythological artifact in pop culture history.
“I was in eighth grade or freshman year of high school, and some kid said, ‘You know, your dad has a sex tape online,'” John Owen recalled. “I was like, What?”
Father and son went on to explain that there was no excruciating sit-down conversation about said sex tape—”Wikipedia and Google took care of that for us,” said Rob—and looking back on it, John Owen now sees the revelation as being akin to a more relatable milestone of coming of age.
“You know what it’s kind of like? Santa Claus,” he said. “I don’t think most parents ever have that moment where they sit the kids down and go, ‘Okay, we’ve got to tell you something.’ A kid just figures it out. There weren’t milestone markers, like, ‘Okay, he’s 16 now, time for them to learn about this part of our life!'”
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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