Not one to be pigeonholed by her good looks, Rose McGowan’s resume is anything but boring. After the brunette beauty first burst onto the big screen in the early ‘90s, she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her role in the indie, The Doom Generation. She came to the attention of the masses in Wes Craven’s Scream with a memorable death-by-garage-door. After taking over the small screen with Charmed, McGowan returned to the big screen in 2007 with Grindhouse, a double dose of 1970s-style awesome. And after the late summer release of Conan the Barbarian, in which she starred as the half-witch Marique, McGowan arrived in New Orleans to shoot The Tell-Tale Heart, a new take on the classic tale of psychological terror from Edgar Allan Poe. The beautiful queen of quirk spoke with Scene over the phone, just before flying back to New Orleans.
MH: Rose! What’s going on?
RM: You’re going to laugh: I’m actually driving on the freeway to go to LAX to New Orleans.
MH: Oh, that always sounds like fun! What are you coming down for?
RM: Just to visit some of the people on the crew and a couple friends I made. There’s a girl on the set who was my stand in and I want to do a short film with her. I want to direct a short film.
MH: Have you been to New Orleans before working on The Tell-Tale Heart?
RM: I saved up my money when I was nineteen. And just took myself there, just because I always felt this strong kinship to it and never knew exactly why. I went and I wandered around the city by myself for about four days. And then I went back later to do the Elvis miniseries that shot there. I played Ann-Margret in that and that was fantastic. It was me and Jonathan Rhys Meyers who just did such a tremendous job, as always.
MH: Were you able to meet Ann-Margret prior to playing her?
RM: I wasn’t, and I was okay with that, ‘cause it was just daunting enough. The strangest thing was that the director said, “For more universal appeal I don’t want you to do the Ann-Margret voice.” I was like, “Well she was kind of known for her voice but okay.” Odd.
MH: I worked on a period piece with Ann-Margret in Louisiana a couple years ago and she was so elegant and just so…
RM: Everybody that I’ve ever talked to, that said they had known her, said she was so lovely and so professional.
MH: So, you shot Elvis here, and now you’re back with The Tell-Tale Heart. Can you tell me how you came to be a part of the project?
RM: I was in Venice, Italy having an amazing time in the most beautiful city on Earth, I do believe. And I got this kind of urgent message about The Tell-Tale Heart [shooting in New Orleans]. I was trying to figure out where a woman would fit into it because, well, there’s no girl in the story. I’d read the story when I was four years old in Italy. I was a very young reader and a precocious reader – and it did give me nightmares – but I’ve always loved Poe. I thought, “Gosh, what more perfect a place could there be than to shoot it there.” Just hanging Spanish moss, kind of Old South, just so beautiful. In any case, I read the script and basically I was just like, “Please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck.” Because so many just suck! I literally think I repeated that in my head ten times. Then I cracked it open, trying to figure out how they were gonna put a woman in it and if it was just like one of those, “We just need a girl.” Then I would not be interested. And the script is so good, and so elegant and my character weaves in and out of it perfectly and seamlessly that it seems that she could have been in the original story, so there was no shock there. It was nice.
MH: Edgar Allan Poe and New Orleans are similar in that they are both American, but seem European in origin.
RM: I agree and very much so. New Orleans definitely has that flavor, especially, because of its history and its origins and obviously Edgar Allen Poe does. He almost seems more like he should be British, doesn’t he?
MH: He does. Even as a child, I thought Poe made Baltimore sound like a European city.
RM: I think in my head when I was little, I’d always assumed it was. That and I didn’t know where Baltimore was anyway!
MH: What were some of your thoughts on Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart as a child?
RM: That story has stayed with me my whole life. When I was little I used to go around putting my ear to the floorboards of different houses, thinking I could hear hearts and I was freaking everybody out. But I was insistent that I could hear hearts under the floor. If everybody would just listen, they would see what I was talking about! So, basically as a child, I got infected with uh, “Poe brain.”
MH: Can you tell me how the writers wove a lady into the iconic Poe story?
RM: She might be real, she might not be real. That’s the interesting part, and it’s kind of open a bit to debate. I’ve got such cool photos. The sets were so brilliant. And because I may or may not be real, everything around me got to be quite fantastical and doesn’t have to be typical set design, like normal rooms in a normal house. And I could be inside and it happens to be snowing on the inside. Such amazing things.
MH: Can you talk about working with Patrick John Flueger, who just had a hit with Footloose?
RM: He’s great. He did a very good job. I’m really sad I didn’t get to work with Peter Bogdanovich. Our scenes just weren’t together. And they frontloaded the film for me, meaning they shot all my stuff, they stuck it all together because I had to go away and do another movie. Which was awesome, but it meant that I didn’t get to hang out with the great Mr. Bogdanovich. I was lucky enough once to sit on a plane next to him on the way to Texas. I was going to film there and he was going to do something with the Austin Film Society. I had this show playing on TCM and he’d seen it. Obviously, he is like a fountain of knowledge and discussing classic film with him was such a treat.
MH: You also had Conan the Barbarian release this year. I’m a huge fan of the original that launched Schwarzenegger’s career, so it was a film that I was awaiting with great anticipation. And I just loved you in it!
RM: I’m so glad! I thought it was such a fun popcorn movie and I have to say: I don’t often love 3-D, but what I liked about… Well for one, it was my first time in 3-D so that was kind of exciting. But it was shot in 3-D, so it looked really good and I liked that instead of having things come out at you in the audience, they used it to kind of get layers into the film.
MH: A lot of the post-production work was actually done in Shreveport at Millennium Studios. The visuals were amazing!
RM: I loved it. I had a great time shooting it. I had taken a break for about three years and it was my first thing back. That was like a year and a couple months ago and I just had a blast. My character was so operatically evil, it was making me laugh! I would literally laugh when they would cut…
MH: Have you worked in make up that was that heavy before?
RM: Nothing to that extent. I mean, he did a tremendous job – Scott Wheeler, the guy that did the makeup – and the prosthetics! I have really sensitive skin. I did a movie called Monkeybone with Brendan Frasier for Fox and I played this character called Miss Kitty. It was for Henry Selick. He’s such a cool director. Unfortunately, the studio took it away from him and it kind of became a fiasco. They didn’t trust him to be the genius that he really was. He later did James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. So amazing. Things were going strange at the studio then. So, they put this little kitten nose on me but it wouldn’t fade into my skin because it’s so fair. To blend it in, it takes a lot. And I think they hurt me during the removal process. And for a year, the skin in between my nose and my face did not grow together. It was brutally painful besides not looking good. I was just terrified that my whole forehead was going to wind up that way but they did a terrific job. I never had to sit that still, which is never my forte, sitting still. Ever.
MH: How long was the make up process for your character, Marique?
RM: About six hours. Toward the end, we got it down to about four-and-a-half or five. And then an hour for removal. They were very long days, but basically my thing is: I’m here to work, I might as well work. Especially in Bulgaria! What else am I gonna do? I would far rather be on the set than sitting around. Movies in general are fairly inefficient but that’s because I think it might be the only art form where you have about a hundred fingers trying to paint what they think is the correct painting, each finger has an ego that’s all involved in it, separately. It’s a tough way to work.
MH: Was there anything freeing or different about working under all that make up?
RM: Completely. And the costumes were also terrific. Completely constructed on me. Cost so much money, and the detail! Even the detail in that film with what the extras were wearing was so intense and so well done. Even the horses…each horse had its own handmade leather armor. Each horse has four dressers for it. It was a pretty huge undertaking. And I felt that character completely the second that whole rigmarole went on. I was definitely transformed into her. And it kind of frees you up to be, again, as operatically evil as one wants to be. You’re not going to go in and do normal acting! (laughs) But I thoroughly enjoyed it and I thought it was just a terrific popcorn film.
MH: Of course, one of the biggest questions going into the making of the film was…who would play Conan?
RM: He looked just like a Frazetta painting come to life, Jason Momoa. Freakishly so.
MH: When he was cast, I knew there would be controversy, but wow did he clear the way for Conan with his gangbusters performance as Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones.
RM: How amazing is he in that?! And literally, could not be a nicer guy. So family-oriented, so in love with his wife, so cool. And so it was a joy getting to hang out with him and act with him. And then there’s Stephen Lang, who’s terrific. He’s on Terra Nova now and he was the evil colonel in Avatar. I think I’m the only person in the world who has not seen Avatar. But when it came out, I was out of the country and then I just somehow missed it. I didn’t want to see it on a small screen, so someday I’m sure they’ll re-release it and I’ll go. But in any case, he plays my dad in Conan. He’s such a strong, amazing actor, and working with him was great fun, too.
MH: For those familiar with Avatar and Conan, they may find him unrecognizable in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the first film to feature the character of Hannibal Lecktor. He plays the slimy, out of shape reporter.
RM: I’ve seen Manhunter but I never made a connection of him being in it. Now I have to go watch it again. I love Manhunter. He’s so buff now! His body’s insane. He’s fifty-seven, and he’s going toe-to-toe with Jason, who’s 6’5” and twenty-eight years old. It was pretty bananas to see them. But that’s what’s great about what I do. I can go from that world to a more esoteric, intellectual world with Tell-Tale Heart. I mean, that’s great. Not many people get to do that kind of stuff. It’s actually good for me to talk about that, and remember that, because a lot of times I loathe the business with a kind of startling intensity. Sometimes it startles me how much I loathe it. It’s good for me to actually remind myself of the simple joys which are getting to go from character to character and place to place.
MH: Are you enjoying feature work as opposed to working the demanding grind of a television show, like Charmed?
RM: I called it the golden handcuffs. Golden because your job’s secure, which you never have as an actor in general. It was tough, though. I’d never been around the same people for that length of time in my whole life, as I was with them. And I love that crew so much, but it was time to go back to features. Although, I just did a television movie that just came out and we got huge ratings. Gerry Abrams produced it. He’s JJ Abrams’ dad. JJ had a big screening of it at Bad Robot, his production office, and I got to see it on the big screen, which was cool. It was like a true crime story. This woman was on the cover of People Magazine – her name was Mary Winkler – and as strong as most of my female roles, she was weak and invisible. So, being somebody who has always been noticed for one reason or another, positively or negatively. I have lived in places, like in Oregon, where they’re like, “You’re the ugliest thing I ever seen.” Or then I would go to Colorado and they would tell me how beautiful I was, which basically cancels it all out. But I always had some reaction. So to play somebody who was the epitome of invisible was really kind of amazing. I would go into a store on a lunch break and nobody would offer any help, it was so interesting. You get to be your own social experiment, and likewise with “crazy forehead” in Conan with a lot of the Bulgarians. Before I would put on the wardrobe, I would walk around looking like [Marique] in the morning, because by the time they got there at seven, I had already been there since 2:00am. A lot of them thought that was really what I looked like (laughs). And I never really bothered to set them straight. I thought it was hilarious. They were a little frightened of me and I thought it was pretty funny.
MH: It sounds like it was Halloween every day for three months.
RM: Pretty much, yeah. And I think she was actually quite majestically beautiful. I think she was kind of amazing looking.
MH: Oh yeah, definitely. I’m really in love with Conan. I felt the whole build up was worth it. It had the tremendous scope that I really wanted. It was great.
RM: That’s the thing. I think a lot of people hold a lot of affection for the Arnold Schwarzenegger one because they saw it when they were little and it was campy and it was nuts but it wasn’t really true to [Conan author] Robert E. Howard. And I think it’s cool to remake things that have the nut of a really good idea but which didn’t quite come off in execution. ‘Cause again, there’s that hundred people making the painting. The movies…it’s just such a crap shoot if they turn out well. And yeah, as goofy as it sounds to say I’m really proud of Conan the Barbarian, I really quite am.
MH: I don’t think that sounds goofy, I think that sounds awesome.
RM: Thank you!
MH: Are there any iconic roles you would like to remake?
RM: God, I mean the iconic ones are the ones that shouldn’t be! But I would love to do, I would love to play Barbara Stanwyck’s character in The Lady Eve. I love screwball comedies and I love Preston Sturges. When I went to do Planet Terror and Grindhouse, I wanted to do screwball comedy and Robert [Rodriguez] wanted to do kind of a zombie film. So if you ever watch it again, look at it with those eyes, ‘cause it’s half and half. And then there’s sadness and crying in it as well, but a lot of it is screwball comedy than a life and death situation.
MH: I loved the Grindhouse movies, Planet Terror and Death Proof. Everyone on the film I was working on at the time in Baton Rouge went to go see it on opening night.
RM: Isn’t it awesome? It’s such an awesome theatrical experience, too. And for me again to get to play the arc from being Cherry – who’s so strong – to being Pam who’s like, I wanted Pam to be really innocent and angelic which is why I had this really amazing flaxen, platinum hair, and then super pale skin. I wanted the audience to be so sad when she gets her face munched in so that’s what I achieved. And with Cherry, I had myself physically like made darker. I wanted to look more Italian.
MH: And I love that you were in both. When you watch Roger Corman movies, they all use the same actors.
RM: Right, I know. And it was so tongue and cheek, but so smart and unique at the same time. They really hit a home run, I thought.
MH: And though your scenes were deleted, you had a role in Machete, which was based on one of the faux trailers included in Grindhouse.
RM: I don’t know. I’ve never seen the film or the deleted scenes. By the way, every way that I kill somebody [in Grindhouse], I came up with! Not kidding. I was sitting in a restaurant and he was saying, “How do we kill the Jessica Alba character? We’ve come up behind her…we’ve already done kind of a garrote, if you will.’ I said, I had a parking slip in front of me and I stuck it in my mouth and just casually exited it from my mouth and said, ‘Look this is the size of a straight razor, I’ll just come from behind, grab her neck, take it out of my mouth and cut her.’ And that’s exactly what I did.
MH: I was fortunate to interview Danny Trejo in the last issue of Scene.
RM: He’s such a character and his kids are so funny, they’re so straight-laced. It’s so cute. And then he’s the one who’s kind of this overgrown twelve-year-old. It’s so cute. The way he dresses and everything. And he’s just got that face. For his sake, I’m glad they made Machete. I just never saw it. A lot of the movies I do, I don’t wind up seeing. Like in my head, I’ve already done them. So, unless I go to the premiere or the situation forces me to, I don’t.
MH: That’s a comment that I hear a lot from below the line people. The film crewmembers.
RM: It’s interesting because, while I’m friends with everybody, those are always my tightest friends, they are always the crew. Always. I’ve been told numerous times that I’m much more like a crew personality, in terms of getting it done. Whatever it takes to get it done and pull up your bootstraps and march on. No matter how tired you are, suck it up. So I’ve got that kind of attitude, just naturally as a worker and it works well. There’s a thing I do on set a lot of times where the first or second day, each crewmember I see, they put a clothespin on you and I have a collection of clothespins. It’s really cute!
MH: Can you tell me about the status of Napa, a project that you’re set to star in? Is that something you’ve shot already?
RM: No, it keeps getting delayed and right now I’m trying to see if I can still do it. Like, every week they’ll be like, “Oh we’re doing it next week.” And I just don’t know if I can stay in limbo anymore. We’re in the process of hopefully in the next week nailing it down. It’s strange to not know if, like in one week, you’re gonna be off somewhere else.
MH: I read that in it, you’ll play an Afghanistan vet who comes back and becomes a sheriff. That sounds amazing.
RM: I know! Which is badass. She’s a sheriff with a drinking problem. She didn’t want to be the sheriff but wound up sheriff because of a strange confluence of events in a small town. The cool thing about it is I’ve been to Afghanistan and I’ve hung a lot with military people so it would certainly be cool to play somebody who was actually there.
MH: Tell me about your work with Daughters of Pulmonary Fibrosis.
RM: I just joined forces with the Daughters of Pulmonary Fibrosis because my father died of pulmonary fibrosis, which is a horrible disease that kills more people than breast cancer each year, but people really don’t know that much about it. If anyone looks up pulmonary fibrosis, they can find Daughters of Pulmonary Fibrosis. They’re lobbying for some sort of recognition in medical circles. There’s almost no attention being paid to it now and a lot of people are dying from it. It’s a shame and it’s a horrible death. It’s not fair.
