FLUFF: Rob Lowe too pretty to take seriously, says Rob Lowe.

Rob Lowe has bravely spoken out about his lifelong struggle with good looks. The excessively handsome actor, now 50, says there’s a prejudice against beautiful people that has profoundly affected him.

Brave, brave soul, Lowe took a long hard look at himself in the mirror… and he liked what he saw.

Distressingly attractive Lowe spoke to The New York Times magazine about the burden of extreme prettiness and how it’s limited his choice of roles in Hollywood.

“There’s this unbelievable bias and prejudice against quote-unquote good-looking people, that they can’t be in pain or they can’t have rough lives or be deep or interesting,” he said. “They can’t be any of the things that you long to play as an actor. I’m getting to play those parts now and loving it. When I was a teen idol, I was so goddamn pretty I wouldn’t have taken myself seriously.”

He elaborated, saying that there’s “a historical bias that good-looking people are not funny”. He admitted that when he was in high school, he was a “theatre geek”. A horrifically beautiful theatre geek.

“It took being famous to make me cool, which, by the way, I never forgot,” he said. 

Generously, Lowe also reached out to a more modern heart-throb during an interview with Oprah. Devilishly cute-faced Justin Bieber is also afflicted with disastrous good looks, says Lowe.

“I have tremendous empathy,” he told Oprah. “He makes really good music, he does, but I think he knows the dark secret, and the dark secret is 80 per cent of his audience doesn’t give a s**t about the music.”

They care about his face, obviously. His hideously beautiful face. “It has nothing to do with what he’s doing as an artist. He is the guy who is standing in front at a moment that they’re going through a developmental thing. It’s natural, it’s all great, but if it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else, like it was me.”

Lowe earned his handsome credentials in the ’80s in The Outsiders and St Elmo’s Fire, when he became fantasy boyfriend to millions of teenage girls. That intense adoration sent him into rehab, which he says changed his life.

“I loved it,” he told Oprah about his time getting treatment. “I couldn’t have gotten sober without rehab because I needed the science. I needed to (learn about) addiction and what it does to your body and all of the research and the things like that.”

The West Wing actor had so much more to say about his handsome existence, he’s actually written an entire book on the subject. His memoir, which we can only assume he wrote shirtless and weeping in front of a full-length mirror, is called Love Life. It’s out now if you can handle the searing account of Too. Much. Handsomeness.

Speaking of excessive handsomeness, here are some other men who struggle publicly with the burden of attractiveness…

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