Rob Lowe makes an awfully good cad – and he knows it.

He first mocked his matinee-idol jawline as a scheming record executive intent on stealing Tia Carrere away from Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, and then swanned through Myers’s Austin Powers sequels as a younger version of Robert Wagner’s Number Two.

Now he’s playing Ricky Gervais’s screenwriter rival Brad Kessler in The Invention Of Lying. And because his character lives in a world where everyone tells the truth, he gets to stab people in the back from the front. We sat down in Toronto during the Film Festival.

Brad Kessler feels a lot like the sleazy record exec you played in Wayne’s World, but now you get to be openly loathsome. 

Exactly. It literally is a deconstruction of that character. The key element is when he says to Ricky, “You threaten me and I don’t know why, and I hate things I’m threatened by.” That’s a great thing for this sort of cinema archetype to do. It made me love him. I’d like to do a TV series and play Brad. He would be genius, every week. 

How much fun is it to come in and do these key supporting roles, like Jeff Megall in Thank You For Smoking or Number Two in the Austin Powers sequels? 

I’m a baseball fan, and I like when the slugger comes out. He doesn’t play the whole game, he’s not in the outfield, you don’t get to watch him standing around and stretching. He comes up, comes to bat, and if he pulls it off, he hits a walk-off grand slam, raises his hands and goes back to the dugout. That’s the goal.

Whether you pull it off or not, one never knows. But when I watch Glengarry Glen Ross, with all those amazing actors, at the end of the day the only one I really give a shit about is Alec Baldwin, who’s onscreen for three minutes, kills it and goes home. 

Now that you have the cushion of a regular TV gig, are you specifically seeking out those roles? 

Well, it’s hard, because I do have a schedule on Brothers & Sisters. I commuted to Boston while I did this. There was no weekend, I was just working. Everything I do has to fit around a schedule, and if it isn’t something really interesting – because it’s going to be exhausting – it’s really easy to not do it. 

A couple of your 80s movies, About Last Night... and St. Elmo’s Fire, have just come out on Blu-ray, and I was surprised how well they’ve held up. 

Isn’t it interesting? In those days, we were like, “Yeah, these are great, I like ’em,” but I wanted to be in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. When you look back on it? Fuckin’ St. Elmo’s Fire, compared to today, is Manhattan. Those movies were pandering teenage movies, in their time. Now, you compare them to a pandering teenage movie of today, and they’re The Magnificent Ambersons. 

Interview Clips

Rob Lowe on how hard it is to make a small movie these days:

Lowe on "the safe harbour of television":

Lowe on his next moves: