


It turns out that Rob Lowe bust a move — and his knee — while auditioning for Footloose.
While appearing on the Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon podcast, Lowe revealed that he had auditioned for the role of Ren McCormack, which ultimately went to Kevin Bacon. During a chat with the star of the 1984 film, Lowe detailed his rather rough audition.
“It’s a dance audition at Paramount. Dance,” he recalled, per The Daily Mail. “By the way, I think it was to a Styx song, of all things.”
He explained that “the end of the dance was a knee slide across the floor,” where he would ultimately “hit his knees and slide across the floor.”
“And my knee explodes,” he continued. “Explodes! Pop. And they take me out of the sound stage on a stretcher.”
He then said Craig Zadan and his fellow producers, who Lowe claimed “were friends of [his] and very pro-[him] doing this movie,” approached him afterwards.

“‘Hey man, it’s cool. At the end of the day, we really decided we’re just going to hire a dancer for the part,'” he remembered them saying. “And a week later, they hired you! And I go, Goddamn these guys! That’s a real actor!”
As for Bacon, he revealed last September that he “wasn’t trained as a dancer,” and “didn’t really understand that it was a dance movie” when he auditioned.
“I thought it was just a movie, and then, where they would indicate that there was dancing, I would just get up,” he recalled on an episode of the Podcrushed podcast. “They said something about a choreographer and I said, ‘You don’t really need a choreographer. I’ll just get up and dance. It’s not a big deal. Just play the record for me and I’ll jump around.’”
Footloose is now streaming on Max.