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Funny and controversial, unafraid to speak her mind, Rose McGowan has combined genuine talent with a flare for the dramatic on screen, writes Ian Spelling
I’m pretty much shocked, sometimes, that I’m an actress,” Rose McGowan says. “It’s like I went off on the wrong path and here I am, and I’m not really sure what to do about it. But I have a lot of fun at the end of the day.
“The part that’s the most stressful is not knowing what, if anything, is around the corner, and the best part is having no idea what’s coming around the corner.”
Whip-smart, funny, controversial and unafraid to speak her mind, McGowan has combined genuine talent with a flare for the dramatic and provocative, on screen, in her fashion sense and in her personal life. In her 20-plus years in the public eye, she has acted in everything from Encino Man (1992), The Doom Generation (1995) and Scream (1996) to Charmed (2001-2006), Grindhouse (2007), Nip/Tuck (2009) and the upcoming Conan the Barbarian, donned more than a few memorable and memorably revealing outfits, romanced Marilyn Manson, Ahmet Zappa and filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, and been the subject of tabloid rumours suggesting that she has gone under the knife in an effort to appear younger.
Speaking by cell telephone from somewhere in Los Angeles, McGowan – who will turn 38 in September – readily acknowledges that she has led a colorful life. That said, she finds the attention paid to her alternately amusing and annoying.
“It depends on the day,” McGowan says. “That’s the best way to describe it. I can get really annoyed by it. I was in a really bad car accident a couple of years ago, and my under-eye got ripped open and my whole face flipped forward. Well, the flaps flipped forward – try to say that three times. But there was a big scar under my eye, and they did plastic surgery. Ever since, there have been these really annoying things like, ‘Oh, she’s had her nose done, or this done.’
“I’ve lost weight and I’ve gotten older,” the actress says. ``I started as a little, round-headed thing and I definitely weigh five to six more pounds, which makes a big difference on a smaller frame. Of course I look different. Everybody does as they just change.
“Also,” she adds, “unless you watched Charmed specifically, for five years I was largely out of the public eye, because I didn’t do a lot of photo shoots or go on television much to promote it. In retrospect that was probably a bad idea, but I’d never done television and I’d always heard that people can get really identified as their television character and that it can be very hard to get jobs afterward. So I tried to go against that.
“I came out of Charmed and, if you didn’t watch that, it seemed that all of a sudden I looked totally different, but that’s just because five years had gone by.”
McGowan is on the phone to talk about Conan the Barbarian. Set for release on Aug. 19 and based on the pulp-fiction saga created by Robert E. Howard, the film follows the eponymous hero (Jason Momoa) as he seeks vengeance against Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), the power-mad villain who killed his father. McGowan plays the villainess Marique, a half-human/half-witch who also happens to be Zym’s approval-seeking daughter.
“I think Marique absolutely cares more about winning the approval of her father (than killing Conan),” McGowan says. “The studio was really nervous. They cut down some moments that shaped the relationship of the characters. She really quite inappropriately loves her father, and he’s obsessed with resurrecting his dead wife. So in some ways that’s really cool. It gives it more pathos than the simple story of the guy who wants all the power or wants to kill Conan so he can have all the power in the world and blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing.
“He’s just really terribly distraught over his dead wife and he wants to resurrect her,” the actress says, “and I’m jealous of my dead mother. And for that I kill.”
McGowan sports a typically exotic, otherworldly look in Conan the Barbarian, from her costume and hair to her skin and talon-spiked fingers. Achieving that look required as long as six hours daily in a makeup chair.
Sure, it got draining, McGowan admits, but it was worth the time spent.
“If anybody else was tired, I was like, ‘Listen, chump, why don’t you get here at 2 in the morning and we’ll talk about tired, OK?,”‘ she says, laughing. “It was interesting, because a lot of people sleep during the makeup process, and I couldn’t, because it was so critical that I not move a muscle.
‘’‘M.T.’ has always been my nickname in makeup chairs,’’ McGowan adds, “because I’m a moving target. I’m always turning my head and seeing what’s going on. I have a really hard time sitting still. I just get so bored and I don’t want to be in the chair anymore. But I was very impressed with (makeup supervisor) Scott Wheeler. Scott is immensely talented, and his team had some people from Bulgaria and some from the States, and they were all so amazing.
“I owed it to them to sit in the chair,” she concludes, “and I wanted to look as good as possible as Marique. I wanted her to look flawless. And I think she’s quite majestic in her own way.”
Conan the Barbarian was shot in Bulgaria, with much of the filming done outdoors, on location. McGowan credits German director Marcus Nispel for masterfully juggling the location challenges, a huge cast, nonstop action, loads of FX, a largely Bulgarian crew and ...
“A lot of producers and that (crazy) accent,” McGowan says, laughing again. ``You know, Marcus was there with his orange pants and his bucket hat and this ridiculously long beard that he refused to shave while he was doing the movie. So pretty much his neck had gray beard hair shooting sideways. He refused to shave it while he was filming. And he always had a smile on his face, no matter what.
IHT-NYT News Syndicate |
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