John Owen Lowe talks about his attempts to step out of the shadow of his famous father Rob Lowe

Rob Lowe and his famously chiseled jawline cast a long shadow. And no one understands that better than his son.

“I’ve had moments where I had no identity because that’s what it was like growing up with a father who sucks the air out of every room you’re in with him,” said John Owen Lowe in a new interview with diversityThe younger Lowe noted that he overcame “a lot of concerns” to star with his father on screen in Netflix’s Unstablewhich premieres on March 30th.

John P. Fleenor/Netflix Rob Lowe and John Owen Lowe on “Unstable”

“The show is about a son who wants to step out of his father’s shadow, and I am literally a son who wants to step out of his father’s shadow,” said John Owen, who serves as executive producer on the series alongside his father.

In the eight-part, half-hour comedy, Rob plays the role of Ellis Dragon and 28-year-old John Owen plays his estranged son Jackson, whose job it is to keep his father, a biotech genius, focused on his potentially humanity-saving work rather than focusing on his grief over his lost wife.

While the series is inspired by father and son, the end result is a mix of truth and fiction.

“Jackson is estranged from his father. Things were never that bad between my father and me,” says John Owen.

“(Jackson is) a little more awkward and lost with people than I am,” he adds, noting the differences between him and the character he plays. “Ellis is a little less tied to reality than my father,” he adds of his father’s character, “but it’s not as far off as he would have you believe.”

“We had these moments on set where his character would complain about my posture or the way I was dressed. They’d yell ‘cut’ and he’d literally say, without breaking his concentration, ‘Are they chiseling your chin? I feel like they’re lighting you too brightly. Your chin needs more definition.’ And I’d say, ‘No, no, no, no, we’re not doing that here in front of everyone.’ It was very funny, cathartic, but also a little meta at times.”

Speaking of the chin: John Owen is aware that the differences between him and his father lie in the area of ​​“full facial structure”.

“I like to tell him sometimes that he has a face that could be punched, and I don’t have anything like that because my jawline is not quite as prominent,” he said.

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