A rose is a rose is a Rose McGowan - actress - Cover Story - Interview

In her movie performances, the prickly Rose McGowan evokes the brittle glamour and imperious moods of Bette Davis, although with a fiercely modern twist. Considering that she's only twenty-two and has already lived a life and a half, she could even better the formidable Bette. In fact, who'd bet against it?

Whichever 1-900 impresario or Larry Flynt manque coined the term nasty girl might have been thinking of Amy Blue, the caustic speed freak played by Rose McGowan in Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995). With her Bette Davis eyes, rasp, and sneer, and her exaggerated Louise Brooks bob, Amy was a spectacularly bitter and ironic Gen-X movie queen. But Amy would have been a mere cipher had not McGowan made her, if scarcely lovable, an oddly sympathetic minx - all too clearly the victim of some parental malfeasance or neglect. She was not so much a nasty girl, then, as a deeply wounded one. It was a dynamite seriocomic performance, and it announced McGowan as an actress with a giant talent and the kind of knowing postmodern glamour that would have made George Hurrell drop his camera.

She has since played the smug blonde coed who gets squashed by the garage door in Scream, and this January there was a McGowan minifest at the Sundance Film Festival, where she appeared in Araki's latest, Nowhere, Mark Pellington's Going All the Way, Rod McCall's Lewis & Clark & George, and Karin Thayer's Seed. The latter film, a seventeen-minute short, is remarkable not only as a psychological case study of a hooker who had been molested by her mother during adolescence but also as a deconstruction of the sleazy allure of prostitution. Says McGowan, whose performance is astonishing, "It's the favorite thing I've done lately."

To what extent McGowan was and wasn't playing herself in The Doom Generation becomes clear in the following interview, which took place in the Interview library one Saturday evening. She had just flown in from the Colorado location of the supernatural thriller Phantoms, and, fighting her desperate need for sleep, she talked unguardedly about her wayward journey through her teens. At the age of twenty-two, McGowan is a wise old woman, yet girlish enough for all her smarts.

GRAHAM FULLER: You're currently the "danger girl" of independent movies. No one else is - you are. Why do you think that is?

ROSE MCGOWAN: I've lived it.

GF: You had a wild childhood, right?

RM: Comparatively, I guess. I was born in Florence [Italy], and brought up in the same cult River Phoenix grew up in, the Children of God. My father ran the Italian chapter, and from the outside it would be considered strange, but if you grow up in it, it's normal. I suppose all children are at the mercy of their parents, and whatever trip they happen to be on, and my parents were tripping pretty hard. [laughs] I have no memory of them almost until we got out of it, although I learned to read when I was three, and I've clear memories from that time on. By the time I was six, I was reading "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." My mom says that every time I'd go into a house with wood floors, I'd feel the floorboards to see what was under them, and I had really bad nightmares and started sleepwalking all over the place. I was also a very stressed-out kid. Apparently, I'd get very angry if my dad wasn't treating my mom right, or if I saw any injustice.

GF: What happened when your family decided to leave the Children of God?

RM: Well, my dad left my mom for my nanny. It was a very soap-operatic life. I'd live one year with my father, who's a pretty amazing artist and had shows in Europe. He had a great house and tons of money so I could have whatever I wanted. Next year, I'd be living with my mom, and we'd be standing in line for groceries from the [free food] kitchen. She had no money because she put herself back through college after having six kids with my dad.

GF: Which one are you?

RM: I'm the second oldest. I have an older brother, but he basically abdicated. He just checked out. He's a good egg, but he didn't want to deal. While I was living with my mom, I pretty much raised my brothers and sisters - fed them, clothed them, blah, blab, blah. Occasionally people say to me, "Oh, isn't it sad that you didn't have a childhood?" But I don't think that way. I think, That's just the way it was. I can't relate to anything else.

GF: Were you a sophisticated child?

RM: Through my father's art contacts at Vogue, I had became a child model, and I was in Vogue Bambini and all those Italian magazines from the time I was three. I was ten when we came back to the States, and I had short, choppy, dyed, jet-black hair and I wore red lipstick. I still have four little '40s-style men's suits that were my favorites from this one shoot that I did. I wore them all the time. I certainly looked strange. But of all the horrible places to live in, my mother had randomly chosen Oregon, which was Tonya Harding Land. All the kids in the school I went to had that little chicken-hawk, feathery thing going on with their hair, and every one of them came up to me in the first week and said, "You're the ugliest thing I've ever seen!"