Rob Lowe said on a recent episode of the “Podcrushed” podcast (via Entertainment Weekly) that exiting “The West Wing” after four seasons was “the best thing” he ever did since his run on the show was “super unhealthy.” Lowe starred as White House communications director Sam Seaborn in Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed NBC drama. He was written out of the show in Season 4 amid rumors of behind-the-scenes salary disputes. He said on the podcast that he felt “undervalued” during his time on the series.
“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.”
“Whenever I share my stories, people are like, ‘I will never share my own stories again,'” Lowe continued. “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.”
Lowe compared his time on “The West Wing” to that of the abusive relationships he watched his children get into when they reached a certain age.
“I could see them having first girlfriends and being in a relationship that was abusive and taking it,” Lowe said. “‘She’s the popular girl, everybody likes her, she’s beautiful, it must be great’ — all the things that people would say about making ‘The West Wing’ to me. ‘It’s so popular, it’s so amazing, it must be amazing.’ But I know what it’s like, and if I couldn’t walk away from it, then how could I empower my kids to walk away from it?”
Lowe added, “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.”
Lowe did not share any specifics about what went down during the making of “The West Wing.” When he left the show in Season 4, he said at the time that it had become “increasingly clear, for quite a while, that there was no longer a place for Sam Seaborn.” The actor would go on to reprise the role for two episodes during “The West Wing” final season in 2006 and again in 2020 for an HBO reunion special.
