Rob Lowe’s Son John Owen Lowe, 28, Reveals How He Found Out About Dad’s Sex Tape

Rob Lowe’s sex tape came out in 1998 when John Owen, his second son, was about three years old.

It’s not clear if Rob Lowe had the sex talk with his son, John Owen Lowe, but he certainly had the sex tape talk. The 28-year-old actor revealed that he learned about his father’s infamous 1998 sex tape from a high school classmate during a chat with Men’s Health published on March 14. “I was in eighth grade or freshman year of high school, and some kid said, ‘You know, your dad has a sex tape online,’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What?’”

“You know what it’s kind of like? Santa Claus,” John Owen continued. “I don’t think most parents ever have that moment where they sit the kids down and go, ‘Okay, we’ve got to tell you something.’ A kid just figures it out. There weren’t milestone markers, like, ‘Okay, he’s 16 now, time for them to learn about this part of our life!’”

Learning about the now 58-year-old star’s sex tape was just the beginning of John Owen’s dad-related issues. He went on to say that he didn’t want to be anywhere near his father once he realized people used him to get close to the St. Elmo’s Fire alum. “The number of times I got compared to my dad, and the number of times he was brought up in conversation, made me so uncomfortable that I wanted to move as far away from that as possible,” he admitted.

However, John Owen eventually came around and is now as close as he can possibly be to his famous father: Their new comedy, Unstable, is about to drop on Netflix. The pair created the script together and based it on their life experiences together. The plot of the series follows a son, played by John Owen, who is forced to work at his father’s (played by Rob) company.

Rob and John Owen previously worked together on Fox’s 9-1-1: Lone Star, which debuted in 2020 and stars the former. John Owen contributed as a writer in more than 30 episodes, while his uncle, Chad Lowe, has acted in and directed a few episodes of the emergency room drama series, per IMDb.

“I’m so happy and proud and it makes coming to work even more fun than it usually is,” Rob said about working with his family during a 2021 chat with Entertainment Tonight. “We can have a full conversation about a scene or a sequence and I’ll forget that it’s my son and I’ll forget that it’s my brother and I’ll be like, man, those guys really knew what the hell they were doing!”

John Owen said that working with his family — and enjoying it so thoroughly— means a lot to him. “It’s rare you get to be best friends [with someone] and also look up to someone and, you know, we work in the same industry, so I get to not only look up to him on an emotional level but also a career level, which is amazing for me,” he noted. How sweet!

Rob shares John Owen his older son, Matthew Lowe, with his wife, Sheryl Berkoff. The pair walked down the aisle in 1991.