Rob Lowe recently talked about the time Tom Cruise knocked him out on film set.
Lowe recently starred on The Rich Eisen Show, during which he recalled his times working with Cruise. The actor mentioned he first met Cruise on the set of The Outsiders when he was 17 and Cruise was 18.
“He was living at Emilio [Estevez]’s house auditioning right after Taps,” Lowe said. “And we would work out and jog like running bros.”
“My favorite Tom [story], and I have a lot of them … was we used to box in the hallway of the hotel where we were staying during The Outsiders.”
“So much testosterone,” he continued. “We’re 18-year-old guys stuck on location. So, we would wear headgear, and we’d have mouthpieces in, but we’d legitimately spar.”
He joked that Cruise was jacked at the time, yet he was “like a pipe cleaner arm.”
“I hadn’t started working out yet,” he explained. “I am not jacked, and Tom is, like, this beast.”
“But I hit him real clean, and I rang his bell, and the next thing I knew, I woke up, I was coming to on the floor,” he said. “He completely knocked me out. Because I hit him hard.”
“That’s what guys do,” he added matter-of-factly. “It’s like Fight Club.”
Rob Lowe Opens Up About Tom Cruise and ‘The Outsiders’
During the interview, Eisen shared a photo of Cruise, Lowe, and the rest of the guys in The Outsiders. He asked Lowe what he thinks when he sees the picture.
“I think of what was happening there,” he said. “We were supposed to be looking tough and cool — obviously we’re not. We shot an hour — tough, cool, tough, cool, tough cool. And they brought in food just off-camera, and there were a lot of local kids who would come into the place when we were shooting and steal the food. And Leif Garrett was standing near them.”
“There was an announcement that the food was for the talent only,” he continued. “And Ralph Macchio said, ‘Yeah, Leif — the food’s for the talent only.
“And we all laughed, and that’s the photo,” Lowe said. “It’s the only smiling photo we took.”