Many decades ago, two young men with the same first name were classmates at a California high school. Both were destined for stardom, only their trajectories were starkly different.
Fresh off his win at the Golden Globes for his film “Oppenheimer,” Robert Downey Jr. recently reflected on the days when he longed for friend Rob Lowe’s success. Appearing on his podcast, “Literally, with Rob Lowe,” Downey explained that jealously was too mild of a categorization of his feelings for Lowe when they both attended Santa Monica High School.
“I want to say I was jealous, but that’s not deep enough,” Downey told Lowe of his professional prowess in high school. “I want to say that I didn’t understand how anyone could get where you were. Let alone, still have attendance in [school]. It just seemed like there was something so high functioning going on, that there was no point for me to even attempt to understand it.”
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Robert Downey Jr. told his friend and fellow actor Rob Lowe that he was beyond “jealous” of him in high school. (Getty Images)
Lowe, who referred to himself as a “little snob b—-” at the time, joked “he couldn’t possibly be bothered with high school theater,” like Downey, since he was a working actor at the time. Lowe remembered sometimes walking past the bulletin board and seeing a message from his agent to phone him.
“Can you imagine what it was like for the rest of us… to see that notification for you?” Downey asked his friend. The “Iron Man” star quipped that the only message he was getting at the time was a notice of suspension.
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Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. at the Screen Actor’s Guild of America Awards in 2001. (Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
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“Well, listen. We’re wired similarly and also super differently,” Lowe told Downey. “Like, you would be impossible to pin down, I would think, for that kind of structure at that point in your life,” he suggested of having his own professional career.
“Yeah, I was a hot mess,” he confirmed.
Although Rob Lowe was a working actor before, he shot to fame in 1983 while on the television show “The Outsiders.” Robert Downey Jr. gained recognition on “Saturday Night Live” around the same time. (Kevin Mazur/VF11/WireImage/Getty Images)
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Downey famously dropped out of high school and moved to New York to pursue acting. Garnering fame during his time on “Saturday Night Live,” his success was hindered due to his documented drug abuse. Downey had a resurgence in the 21st century and remains an extremely popular figure in Hollywood today.
