Rob Lowe Says Demi Moore Was 'Very Helpful' to His Sobriety: 'She Was a Huge Inspiration'
Rob Lowe is thanking Demi Moore for helping him get sober as the actress recounts her own struggles with substance abuse in her new memoir, Inside Out.
The actor, 55, spoke about Moore, 56, while on The View on Monday, saying his St. Elmo’s Fire costar “was the first person I ever knew who got sober.”
“She was a huge inspiration to me,” he said. “It was the 80s, we were all doing our thing. I just remember thinking, ‘If that girl can get sober, anybody can.'”
Lowe has been sober for 29 years, saying, “Everybody has that person in their life where they go, ‘That’s a great example.’ So it was very helpful.”
The actor also revealed that he “loved rehab,” explaining it gave him “answers that I didn’t have” about life.
“It was like going to school to learn how to live your life with tools that nobody ever taught me,” he said. “Here’s one of the great ones I learned: Never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.'”
Lowe continued, “I spend a lot of time thinking, ‘Should I be doing this, should I be doing that?’ It changed my life. I have great empathy in people who can just do it themselves. I needed experts. It was great, it was fantastic.”
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Moore and Lowe also starred together in the 1986 film About Last Night. In her memoir, the actress wrote about her marriages to Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher, body image issues and substance abuse.
In her memoir, Moore wrote about the emotional toll her relationship with and marriage to Kutcher, 41, took on her mental and physical health — and how it heightened her existing insecurities about aging in Hollywood.
RELATED VIDEO: Demi Moore Claims Ashton Kutcher Said Their Threesomes ‘Justified’ His Cheating
In 2012, the star was rushed to the hospital after smoking synthetic marijuana and inhaling nitrous oxide at a party. “Part of my life was clearly unraveling,” Moore said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “I had no career. No relationship.”
Moore also wrote about breaking her almost 20-year sobriety after meeting Kutcher, a “gradual downward spiral” that led her to turn to alcohol and drugs.
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While celebrating her 45th birthday in Mexico with friends, Moore wrote she started drinking heavily and was “passing out and slipping under the water” in a hot tub. She claimed Kutcher was “furious” and carried her back to bed, but that his mixed signals about her drinking were “confusing.”
“Ashton had encouraged me to go in this direction. When I went too far, though, he let me know how he felt by showing a picture he’d taken of me resting my head on the toilet the night before,” she wrote. “It seemed like a good-natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming.“
Inside Out is now available.
