Rob Lowe Recalls ‘Super Unhealthy’ Workplace on ‘The West Wing’: ‘I Walked Away’
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The set of The West Wing, a TV series set in a historically toxic workplace (the White House), was actually a real life toxic workplace, according to Rob Lowe. The actor, who played deputy communications director Sam Seaborn on the show, told Podcrushed (via Entertainment Weekly) that he worked on only four of the acclaimed series’ seven seasons because he was so unhappy.
“I walked away from the most popular girl at school,” he said, metaphorically referring to The West Wing, “but I also knew that it was a super unhealthy relationship, and it was the best thing I ever did.”
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Whenever actors complain to him about their experience, Lowe said he quickly tops their stories with tales from his stint on The West Wing. He hinted that he felt like people he worked with would “want to see you fail, don’t appreciate you.”
“Whenever I share my stories, people are like, ‘I will never share my own stories again,'” he said. “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.”
In his 2011 memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Lowe wrote about how he felt jilted by being excluded from a photo shoot for Emmy Magazine (then seeing everyone in the shoot get nominations). He said he felt his castmates were “meeting in secret to plot an early renegotiation strategy … and they didn’t include me.” In 2001, Lowe was making around $70,000 per episode of the show, according to Entertainment Weekly, while his costars — Allison Janney, Richard Schiff, John Spencer, and Bradley Whitford — were making around $30,000 an episode. They threatened to walk if they weren’t paid more, leading to each getting raises similar to Lowe’s. When Lowe asked for a raise, too, producers told him to wait a year. A source identified as an “NBC insider” by Entertainment Weekly speculated Lowe didn’t get a raise because the network had yet to turn a profit.
“There was no longer a place for Sam Seaborn on The West Wing,” the actor said in a statement when he left the show. His exit, at the time, was described as amicable. Lowe returned for two episodes in the final season and portrayed Seaborn again in 2020 for an HBO fundraiser.
“I left The West Wing after four seasons and some eighty-plus episodes,” he wrote in his book. “It was one of the highlights of my career and I have zero regrets.”
Lowe told Podcrushed he “tried to make it work” and suggested, metaphorically, his costars were “in a relationship that was abusive and taking it.”
“‘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,” Lowe said on the podcast. “‘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?”
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