Rob Lowe has been sober for 34 years, but he said his decision to get clean was the result of a culmination of moments that gave him a “final wake-up call.”
“Getting sober was an incremental decision,” he told PEOPLE in a cover story that celebrated 10 transformative moments in the Unstable actor’s life. “It’s baby steps until you’re ready. You can’t do it until you’re really ready.”
The 60-year-old Hollywood icon recalled that there were plenty of little realizations before entering rehab at Sierra Tucson in 1990, like when he watched Warren Beatty, one of his “heroes,” in the 1975 romantic comedy Shampoo. “It’s a great movie, but at the end, he’s a bon vivant, charming playboy left with nothing,” he said. “It affected me tremendously and [was] the first glimmer of your conscience, your destiny, God, going, ‘Psst, pay attention to this.'”
After the now-infamous sex tape of him hooking up with two young women—one 22-year-old and one 16-year-old—around the 1988 Democratic Convention was leaked to the public, he said that scandal “definitely changed [his] life at the time.”
“In hindsight, I realized it was another step that led me to recovery and reevaluating my life,” he said. “But the thing that really changed me was not being able to show up for my family and myself.”
The moment he pinpointed as his final wake-up call came in 1990 when his grandfather had a heart attack, and Lowe ignored his mother’s desperate calls.
“I remember like it was yesterday: My mom telling me [on the answering machine] to ‘pick up, pick up’ because my grandpa had had a heart attack. I couldn’t deal with it in the state I was in, and I needed to go to sleep to wake up so I could deal with it,” the actor mentioned, saying he immediately turned to tequila.
“Who doesn’t keep a bottle of [Jose] Cuervo Gold by their bedside table? That was the final wake-up call. I’ve been sober ever since.”
Since getting sober, Lowe said he was “so ready” to move past his hard-partying days.
“It was scary, [but] I learned the tools to change your life if you have the self-honesty to do it,” he said. “I felt, ‘Oh, okay, I’m not alone. I’m not crazy.'”
At the end of the day, Lowe said, “You only are going to stop when you’re ready, period.”