Bill O'Reilly to Rob Lowe: You Sound Like a Libertarian

Actor Rob Lowe said on Fox News he's "a Hollywood pinhead" who doesn't "know about political labels," showing mock surprise that his anti-government stance might mean he's a libertarian.

"Individuals usually do a better job than the government," Lowe told Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday night's "O'Reilly Factor" show, reiterating a statement he made earlier this week in an interview in The New York Times. "I want the government out of almost everything."

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O'Reilly argued that Lowe's "pinhead friends in Hollywood" want equality for all, which takes massive government intervention.

"Equality for everybody is great," responded Lowe. "That would be amazing. I just think that individuals usually do a better job than collective big government."

But when O'Reilly told Lowe that by his not wanting the government to tell him how to live, "that's kind of a libertarian position," Lowe seemed mildly surprised.

"Well, that's funny, does that make me a libertarian?" said Lowe. "I'm a Hollywood pinhead, Bill, I don't know about political labels."

Lowe was on Wednesday night's program to promote his latest book, "Love Life." While O'Reilly traded "pinhead" barbs with the actor, they already had a connection before Wednesday night's show, after Lowe played the role of the late President John F. Kennedy last fall in a television adaptation of O'Reilly's book "Killing Kennedy."

But even though he played a politician on television, Lowe told O'Reilly that he's spent a lot of time "shedding the dogma of political labels," and that the host was telling him "now I have to go back to living under political labels."

O'Reilly agreed that he also doesn't think the government can solve all problems it promises, but that he's "not a libertarian."

Lowe also on Wednesday railed, jokingly, about Hollywood's bias against good-looking people, as his book in part decries "an unbelievable bias and prejudice against quote-unquote good-looking people, that they can't be in pain or they can't have rough lives or be deep or uninteresting."

“You’re telling me that, because you’re a pretty boy, you don’t get the real gravitas parts that someone like Daniel Day Lewis would get,” O’Reilly said. “Is that what you’re saying here?”

Lowe said that he's been told, for example, that he can't play a PTA father, even though he is one in real life, and he is instead being pushed toward taking a role "as a rich jerk."

Lowe also said he'd like to portray Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he called "unbelievable" and "a boss," joking to O'Reilly that he has the chest and "the pecs."

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