Rob Lowe Went from High School ‘Theater Nerd’ to ‘Girls Breaking into My House and Stealing My Underwear’ After “The Outsiders” (Exclusive)

Lowe, who stars in the new movie ‘The Musical,’ takes PEOPLE back to his high school days, when his social status changed practically “overnight”

NEED TO KNOW

• Rob Lowe speaks to PEOPLE about his new comedy, The Musical, which is set at a middle school and is now in theaters
• Lowe was a “theater nerd” and “young careerist” at that age, he recalls
• His social status changed “overnight,” he says, upon booking his feature film debut in the 1983 hit The Outsiders

Rob Lowe had an atypical teenage experience, to say the least.

The producer-star of The Musical, a new dark comedy set at a middle school, recalls for PEOPLE that he was “like a mini adult” at that age. “I was just a really young careerist,” he says.

Lowe, now 62, grew up in Dayton, Ohio, doing summer stock theater before moving to California following his parents’ divorce. “I had a nice little theater résumé for an 11, 12-year-old,” says the actor, who landed his first professional job in an Ohio production of Sherlock Holmes.

Playing a middle school principal opposite a young cast in The Musical, says Lowe, “took me back to not only being a young actor on a set for the first time — because this was a lot of their first roles — but it took me back to doing school plays, which I did so many at their age.”

The then-aspiring actor was, in his words, “definitely that theater nerd.”

So the transition from the Midwest to Santa Monica High School was almost as wild as what would happen later, when Lowe booked his feature film debut in 1983’s The Outsiders. “I remember moving to Malibu and being just appalled at the cool kids who would show up late with sand in their hair because the surf was up,” he quips.

“The concept of ditching school to go smoke pot on the beach… my Midwestern, ‘sit in the front row, raise your hand’ brain was blown,” The Floor host says. “I was auditioning all the time and really, really dedicated at a young age, and that was not going over well at all with the swell set at Santa Monica High School.”

However, the script was flipped when being an uncool “theater kid,” Lowe says, took him to The Outsiders. The actor made a buzzy debut with several screen icons in the making: C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise, all under Francis Ford Coppola’s direction.

“Overnight, with one thing, it changed, and I went from not being on the cool kid list to having girls breaking into my house and stealing my underwear,” he recalls.

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The Outsiders, adapted by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell from the 1967 novel by S. E. Hinton, also signaled an “explosion of youth in movies and TV,” as the West Wing Emmy nominee notes. “There was no Nickelodeon, none of that existed. So the notion that you could have a career — or, God forbid, be famous — as a kid was foreign, even in Los Angeles. So people didn’t understand what I was trying to do.”

The Musical, directed by Giselle Bonilla and written by Alexander Heller, also stars Will Brill and Gillian Jacobs. The movie is now in theaters.

Lowe’s upcoming projects include The Third Parent, which opens on Jan. 22, comedy-drama My New Friend Jim and a rom-com led by Cameron Diaz.