DREAM Team

Rob Lowe and son John Owen open up to Us about fame, family and finding their groove together

- JAIME HARKIN

Father-son duo Rob and John Owen Lowe had no shortage of inspiration to draw from when creating their new show, Unstable. In the Netflix comedy, Rob stars as larger-than-life biotech genius Ellis Dragon, while John Owen plays his son, Jackson, an introverted flutist trying to find his own path outside his dad’s formidable shadow. “The scene where Ellis tells me to tighten up my core, that came from a real-life moment,” admits John Owen. “The story of Unstable,” adds Rob, “is really the story of us.”

It’s not the first collaboration between Rob, 59, and 27-year-old John Owen. They costarred in the 2015 sitcom The Grinder, and John Owen has written multiple episodes of his dad’s hit procedural, 9-1-1: Lone Star. (His hilarious trolling of Rob’s Instagram posts has also gone viral.) But their latest project is their most personal. “We couldn’t have done this show without the other, in every way,” says Rob, who also shares son Matthew, 29, with his wife of 31 years, makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff. “There’s no way I was going to do a father-son series and not have my son there. He was really ready to carry a show of this caliber, and I’m so proud of him.”

STARTING POINT 

John Owen tells Us he’d been bouncing the idea for Unstable around for a few years. “When I was working on