Cruise “completely knocked me out.” Rob Lowe recounts his hilarious sparring story from the set of director Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983), which co-starred the future Hollywood heavyweight and star of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the running man himself: Tom Cruise. As Lowe puts it, “testosterone” got the better of the two co-stars as they sparred in the hallway of their hotel while away from the film’s set. Lowe said during an interview on The Rich Eisen Show:
“I love him [Cruise] so much.
He’s the best.
He’s so competitive that we used to box in the hallway of the hotel we were staying at during Outsiders.
So much testosterone: We’re 18-year-old guys stuck on location.
So, we would wear headgear, and we’d have mouthpieces in, but we would legitimately spar.
And I just remember, Tom is jacked. I’m like a pipe-cleaner arm.
I hadn’t started working out yet, so I’m super like… I look like Karen Carpenter.”
Lowe continued:
“I am like… I am not jacked,
and Tom is like this beast.
And I hit him real clean…
and I rang his bell.
And the next thing I knew I woke up, and I was coming to on the floor.
He like completely knocked me out because I hit him hard and his eyes went black.
But that’s the stuff we did, that’s what guys do,
it’s like Fight Club.”
Rob Lowe Handled Brat Pack Moniker Best
Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise were but two of the up-and-coming actors who appeared in The Outsiders back in 1983. However, two of those talents, Lowe and Emilio Estevez, would also later become members of the vaunted Brat Pack — nicknamed wrongly or rightly — which branded some of Hollywood’s best young performers from the 1980s, including Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, among others.
Another member, Andrew McCarthy, recently delved into the Brat Pack phenomenon via a documentary he made simply titled Brats. And while Lowe may not have been able to take a punch from Cruise, McCarthy does believe that Lowe was the best when it came to handling the Brat Pack mystique, which was thrust upon that now famous group of Hollywood players. McCarthy said in an exclusive interview with MovieWeb:
“I think we all disliked it at first,
but I think Rob very quickly realized how the public was right and that they just saw it as this wonderful kind of thing.
It’s like,
‘Oh, they’re us. These guys are us. I want to hang with them. I want to party with them,’ you know?
As time went on,
we became this representation of youth.”
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Andrew McCarthy Opens Up About His New Doc, Brats, and How the Brat Pack Actors Were ‘Used’
The St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink star unpacks the cultural phenomenon of The Brat Pack, ’80s films, and reuniting with his costars.
Several key members of the Brat Pack, including Ally Sheedy, Lowe, Moore and Estevez participated in the making of McCarthy’s documentary. However, Anthony Michael Hall was noticeably absent, along with the aforementioned Ringwald and Nelson, who were mentioned but did not make appearances in Brats. McCarthy explained their absence during the same sit-down:
“I think people choosing to participate and not participate is sort of insightful and contributes to the film in its own way, anyway,
because the Brat Pack was such a peculiar thing to navigate over time —
and that some people have chosen to fully embrace it.
Other people, like me, are kind of looking into it and going, ‘You know what, I think this is kind of a beautiful thing.’
And other people are just like, ‘I’m not going there.’ And so, I think all that informs the story. This was a complicated time.”
The Outsiders
is available to buy or rent on a number of VOD platforms, including YouTube and
Fandango at Home.
Meanwhile,
Brats
is currently available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.