Rob Lowe Recalls ‘Surreal’ Experience When He Inspired Halloween Costumes amid ‘Nuts’ ’80s Fame (Exclusive)

At his peak Hollywood It Boy fame during the ’80s, Rob Lowe navigated a superstar life and some serious frenzied fandom. People broke into his house and nabbed his underwear. Cops had to break up screaming throngs. The list goes on.

“It was crazy stuff,” Lowe, 60, told PEOPLE recently while reminiscing about transformative moments throughout his life. “It’s the kind of stuff you look back on and go, did that really happen?”

But one of the more bizarre things that came in the wake of St. Elmo’s Fire, the Brat Pack era’s 1985 magnum opus? People dressing up as Lowe for Halloween.

“It was surreal,” he said of spotting strangers conjuring his character, Billy Hicks, the charismatic party boy with a heart of gold from the classic film.

“It was the first time I ever saw someone dressed like me for Halloween… I remember being on a balcony, looking down and somebody getting out of a car dressed like my character with a saxophone over their back and the shaggy hair, earring and the Hawaiian shirt,” he recalled.

Even before St. Elmo’s Fire launched him and his Brat Pack brethren, including Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy and Emilio Estevez, to epic fame in the ‘80s, Lowe had a taste of fandom thanks to the success of films like The Outsiders and Oxford Blues.

“I remember them having to bring me on and off the set of St. Elmo’s Fire in a police car, and that wasn’t the first or only time,” he said. “The stories I have are mental, they’re nuts.”

Now 60 and enjoying an enduring career that’s spanned decades and genres, Lowe has a special appreciation for those glory days.

“It was an incremental process to occupying that place in the culture that I did in the ’80s, and it was a lot,” said Lowe, who made his film debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 coming-of-age classic The Outsiders.

“I’m super grateful that I can say that I had that in my life, because very few people get to be that person. Every decade there’s a new crop and society demands it. It’s fun to watch that unfold having been there.”

He added: “Today it would be [Justin] Bieber, Taylor Swift, I don’t know if it’s Austin Butler, whoever it is today, there’s always going to be somebody living that life.”

While he remembers the ’80s with a certain fondness, Lowe said he grappled at the time with how to make sense of the white-hot spotlight. “The unease I felt with it I could never put my finger on until many years later and a lot of self-reflection, which came with getting into recovery,” said Lowe, who is 34 years sober. 

“I was intuitive enough in those days to sense the disconnect between me, who I was, the work I was doing, that was out there in the public and making this phenomenon, the hysteria, happen.”

Still, Lowe said his peak celebrity pales in comparison to the stratospheric fame juggled by the likes of Swift. “I watch that, and it’s what I went through on gazillion steroids.”