Rob Lowe compares filming 'The West Wing' to a 'super unhealthy relationship'

foxnews.com:

Rob Lowe revealed why he left "The West Wing" in a new interview. Lowe, now 59, explained he felt "undervalued" while filming the show and noted that his experiences would "make your hair stand up." "I felt very undervalued.

Whenever I talk to actors who complain about, you know, their relationships on their shows, it happens," he explained during an appearance on Stitcher Studios’ "Podcrushed." "It happens in any workplace.

You could be in an environment where people sandbag you, want to see you fail, don’t appreciate you, whatever it is – and whenever I share my stories, people are like, ‘I will never share my own stories again.’" "They would make your hair stand up and there’s some of them I wrote," Lowe continued. "I shared some of them in my book, but I purposely didn’t share half of the other ones because it would make the people involved look so bad that I didn’t want to do it to them." Lowe appeared in the first four seasons of "The West Wing" as deputy White House communications director Sam Seaborn.

He left the show, in 2002 and Seaborn was written out of the show with a run for Congress in California. At the time, Lowe's exit from the show was marketed as amicable and pinned on his character's storyline fizzling out. "As much as it hurts to admit it, it has been increasingly clear, for quite a while, that there was no longer a place for Sam Seaborn on 'The West Wing,'" the actor said in a statement at the time. "Warners had allowed me an opportunity to leave the show as I arrived – grateful for it, happy to have been on it and proud of it.