Post by TutorGirl on Apr 28, 2006 21:02:51 GMT -5
(Old Interview)
The future Mrs. Marilyn Manson bares all about bad girls, Jennifer Love and that dress
Long before she bared nearly all beside future fiancé Marilyn Manson at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards, Rose McGowan knew how to cause a stir.
Raised in an Italian commune run by the Children of God (a hippie/religious cult whose members included the parents of River and Joaquin Phoenix), McGowan learned early that if she wanted to get attention from distracted adults, she'd have to use her imagination.
It's been in overdrive ever since.
McGowan's family left Italy when she was nine and settled in the United States, where she had a troubled adolescence. Headstrong and smart-mouthed, Rose ran away from her Seattle home at 13, sleeping on the streets or in nightclubs after hours.
In 1994, the angry young McGowan was spotted by a casting agent on an L.A. sidewalk and transformed into the angry young lead in Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation.
She earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for that role, and parts in Scream, Going All the Way and Phantoms followed. But those were just warm-ups for her latest role as Courtney Shane, the bitch princess of Ronald Reagan High in the dark comedy Jawbreaker.
Outspoken, dangerously voluptuous and almost as outrageous as her husband-to-be, 23-year-old McGowan's twisted wit is as arresting as her edge-of-the-abyss fashion sense--and just as revealing
So, do you like jawbreakers?
I used to when I was little, when my parents were full-on, hippie carob-for-chocolate freaks. I would eat them at night and hide them, 'cause they take, like, a good two weeks to get through. Then I'd pick off the lint and eat them again the next night. I had all these weird candy stains on my sheets.
And how do you like your cruel, manipulative, murderous Courtney in Jawbreaker?
I see this as, like, a prequel to The Last Seduction. But you know, watching the movie, even I was sometimes saying, "Oh my goodness." But I thought it was fun. You can laugh at how she's so evil. And she's only in high school. But I also really liked it because it's kind of deviant, which I'm always there to promote.
And quite successfully. The current issue of Maxim dubs you Hollywood's Number One Bad Girl.
Not number two. Number one!
Who's number two?
Don't know. Probably me next week, honey.
I think you've got the crown for a little while longer. I mean, that dress you wore to the MTV Video Awards is burned pretty deep into the collective psyche.
You're tellin' me--to an absurd extent. But I used to go to nightclubs dressed in crazier outfits, so for me it wasn't so bizarre. But it was very photographed--hee-hee-hee--I guess that's kind of bizarre. I thought it was a hoot. I actually expected other people to be more crazy or flamboyant that night, and I wound up being kind of the only one.
You obviously enjoy provoking outrage.
Well, there are some people who like living behind the scenes, and their thing is not to stir up controversy or be at the eye of the storm. But there are times when it can be kind of fun.
Think you'll ever top the barely-a-dress stunt?
Maybe, maybe not, we'll have to wait and see. I might shock people by my very sedateness. But I doubt it.
Where does your outrageous attitude come from?
Maybe it's because there's something about me people just try to crush. I've always been told that I was wrong or bad. I think that might have been because I was always one to ask why.
At a very early age, I had a really great B.S. detector. It made people nervous, especially people in the commune who would hold themselves next to God. Even when I was four, I could see that that was patently untrue, that people's actions were not corresponding with their ideas of themselves. And I pretty much spoke my mind on those observations; now I see how that, coming out of a two-foot-tall person, may have been a little freaky.
Most people view Children of God as another weird religious cult, but I guess it was just home to you.
I don't remember so much their ideology, but I don't think they were even very clear on that. Mostly, I think it's funny, but I have a perverse sense of humor. Anyway, you don't know it's not the white picket fence until someone points it out.
What was it like growing up in that environment?
Actually, for me it was kind of idyllic. I was in Italy, near Florence. We lived in these beautiful rolling farmlands. My pet was a little baby lamb that I took everywhere and hand-fed from bottles. Big fields of daisies, playing in fig trees with my brothers and sisters; I learned how to read when I was three, because they were, like, big into child education. It was actually when I came to America that things really started to suck.
When you were in junior high school, you went Goth in a big way...
A little bit, yeah; more like a weird mix between Goth and Mod. I know it sounds strange, but I somehow managed to pull it off as a look.
And it alarmed your parents so much they sent you to a drug rehab program.
And I never did drugs! I learned all about them in there, though. That's all you did, go to school eight hours a day and get taught about drugs: what to take, the amount, the effect, how much they cost on the street. Thanks for the education.
I bet you were a model prisoner, too.
Oh, yeah. I once snorted Sweet 'n Low just to piss 'em off. But the joke was on me. Lemme tell ya, that stuff is disgusting.
You eventually ran away from the drug program and lived on the street. That must've been delightful.
I was 13, 14--tough age for that. It was hard, living off dimes you picked up off the sidewalk, eating a Taco Bell burrito, like, every two days. But life is full of worse things.
Is that when you developed dreams of being a movie star, as a fantasy refuge from your harsh existence?
Hardly. The rest of America isn't quite as media savvy as Los Angeles would think. My idea was that actors were like Kirk Cameron, not my style at all. Actors I knew who were close to my age when I was young, I made fun of.
So , you were just standing outside of a gym in L.A., waiting for a friend, when you landed The Doom Generation?
It seemed everyone in the gym was wearing weird, exercise thong-type things, and it was just too frightening for me to deal with. So, I was standing outside in my little black miniskirt, black tights and black boots, and it was cold. Gregg Araki's casting director came out and went, "My God, Gregg's been looking for someone to play this angry girl, and this little pissed-off person here looks just like the person!" That was it.
I remember that film's motto was "Eat Fuck Kill." Something about you obviously evoked that then, and Jawbreaker isn't going to change your image.
Well, I'm not a Jennifer Love Hewitt. I don't know her work very well, but she's obviously very sweet and poses for pictures with, like, hearts on her shirt. God bless...it's just not my bag. And it doesn't mean I want to go out there and kill people or something, and it doesn't mean that I'm not extremely sweet under the right circumstances.
But anger management is a struggle for you.
My instinct is that when people attack me, I want to knock their block off. But I don't want a life that's eaten alive by anger or bitterness. It's just not worth it.
Your new fiancé, Brian Warner--aka Marilyn Manson--is one of the most vilified and controversial acts in rock history. But I hear that, in real life, he's a pretty well adjusted person. Has he taught you anything?
He helps me let things go. He taught me not to let things fester inside and to roll with the punches. He's got a really good attitude--he'd have to, when you think about it--about people throwing stones. But the thing with him is, he's not that different from his stage persona. It's not all fake, it's how he expresses himself. He can be really wild at home or not, just like we all can. Well, some of us. [Laughs.]
Okay, I'm intrigued. What do you two do for fun?
Well, actually, we're movie addicts. And he's seen more than I have. We like obscure, goofy stuff. We get really excited when movies like Just One of the Guys and My Bodyguard come on. And we both have a coincidental fascination with Lionel Richie. Y'know, weird stuff. Funny stuff. We make each other laugh a lot.
Gee, a happy home and a booming career. Maybe being Rose McGowan isn't such an extreme psychodrama after all.
Well, something I've really wrestled with is being in what is basically a masochistic business. Because I fell into it accidentally, I spent a good year and a half on the fence, wondering why I would put myself in a position to get the crap kicked out of me and go home crying from auditions and such.
I've always been a very resilient person, but it's interesting to see how one has to develop on a soul level to be in this kind of a business, if you're going to keep grounded and a strong sense of yourself. It's almost, strangely, a more personal journey than a business one, if you will.
The future Mrs. Marilyn Manson bares all about bad girls, Jennifer Love and that dress
Long before she bared nearly all beside future fiancé Marilyn Manson at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards, Rose McGowan knew how to cause a stir.
Raised in an Italian commune run by the Children of God (a hippie/religious cult whose members included the parents of River and Joaquin Phoenix), McGowan learned early that if she wanted to get attention from distracted adults, she'd have to use her imagination.
It's been in overdrive ever since.
McGowan's family left Italy when she was nine and settled in the United States, where she had a troubled adolescence. Headstrong and smart-mouthed, Rose ran away from her Seattle home at 13, sleeping on the streets or in nightclubs after hours.
In 1994, the angry young McGowan was spotted by a casting agent on an L.A. sidewalk and transformed into the angry young lead in Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation.
She earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for that role, and parts in Scream, Going All the Way and Phantoms followed. But those were just warm-ups for her latest role as Courtney Shane, the bitch princess of Ronald Reagan High in the dark comedy Jawbreaker.
Outspoken, dangerously voluptuous and almost as outrageous as her husband-to-be, 23-year-old McGowan's twisted wit is as arresting as her edge-of-the-abyss fashion sense--and just as revealing
So, do you like jawbreakers?
I used to when I was little, when my parents were full-on, hippie carob-for-chocolate freaks. I would eat them at night and hide them, 'cause they take, like, a good two weeks to get through. Then I'd pick off the lint and eat them again the next night. I had all these weird candy stains on my sheets.
And how do you like your cruel, manipulative, murderous Courtney in Jawbreaker?
I see this as, like, a prequel to The Last Seduction. But you know, watching the movie, even I was sometimes saying, "Oh my goodness." But I thought it was fun. You can laugh at how she's so evil. And she's only in high school. But I also really liked it because it's kind of deviant, which I'm always there to promote.
And quite successfully. The current issue of Maxim dubs you Hollywood's Number One Bad Girl.
Not number two. Number one!
Who's number two?
Don't know. Probably me next week, honey.
I think you've got the crown for a little while longer. I mean, that dress you wore to the MTV Video Awards is burned pretty deep into the collective psyche.
You're tellin' me--to an absurd extent. But I used to go to nightclubs dressed in crazier outfits, so for me it wasn't so bizarre. But it was very photographed--hee-hee-hee--I guess that's kind of bizarre. I thought it was a hoot. I actually expected other people to be more crazy or flamboyant that night, and I wound up being kind of the only one.
You obviously enjoy provoking outrage.
Well, there are some people who like living behind the scenes, and their thing is not to stir up controversy or be at the eye of the storm. But there are times when it can be kind of fun.
Think you'll ever top the barely-a-dress stunt?
Maybe, maybe not, we'll have to wait and see. I might shock people by my very sedateness. But I doubt it.
Where does your outrageous attitude come from?
Maybe it's because there's something about me people just try to crush. I've always been told that I was wrong or bad. I think that might have been because I was always one to ask why.
At a very early age, I had a really great B.S. detector. It made people nervous, especially people in the commune who would hold themselves next to God. Even when I was four, I could see that that was patently untrue, that people's actions were not corresponding with their ideas of themselves. And I pretty much spoke my mind on those observations; now I see how that, coming out of a two-foot-tall person, may have been a little freaky.
Most people view Children of God as another weird religious cult, but I guess it was just home to you.
I don't remember so much their ideology, but I don't think they were even very clear on that. Mostly, I think it's funny, but I have a perverse sense of humor. Anyway, you don't know it's not the white picket fence until someone points it out.
What was it like growing up in that environment?
Actually, for me it was kind of idyllic. I was in Italy, near Florence. We lived in these beautiful rolling farmlands. My pet was a little baby lamb that I took everywhere and hand-fed from bottles. Big fields of daisies, playing in fig trees with my brothers and sisters; I learned how to read when I was three, because they were, like, big into child education. It was actually when I came to America that things really started to suck.
When you were in junior high school, you went Goth in a big way...
A little bit, yeah; more like a weird mix between Goth and Mod. I know it sounds strange, but I somehow managed to pull it off as a look.
And it alarmed your parents so much they sent you to a drug rehab program.
And I never did drugs! I learned all about them in there, though. That's all you did, go to school eight hours a day and get taught about drugs: what to take, the amount, the effect, how much they cost on the street. Thanks for the education.
I bet you were a model prisoner, too.
Oh, yeah. I once snorted Sweet 'n Low just to piss 'em off. But the joke was on me. Lemme tell ya, that stuff is disgusting.
You eventually ran away from the drug program and lived on the street. That must've been delightful.
I was 13, 14--tough age for that. It was hard, living off dimes you picked up off the sidewalk, eating a Taco Bell burrito, like, every two days. But life is full of worse things.
Is that when you developed dreams of being a movie star, as a fantasy refuge from your harsh existence?
Hardly. The rest of America isn't quite as media savvy as Los Angeles would think. My idea was that actors were like Kirk Cameron, not my style at all. Actors I knew who were close to my age when I was young, I made fun of.
So , you were just standing outside of a gym in L.A., waiting for a friend, when you landed The Doom Generation?
It seemed everyone in the gym was wearing weird, exercise thong-type things, and it was just too frightening for me to deal with. So, I was standing outside in my little black miniskirt, black tights and black boots, and it was cold. Gregg Araki's casting director came out and went, "My God, Gregg's been looking for someone to play this angry girl, and this little pissed-off person here looks just like the person!" That was it.
I remember that film's motto was "Eat Fuck Kill." Something about you obviously evoked that then, and Jawbreaker isn't going to change your image.
Well, I'm not a Jennifer Love Hewitt. I don't know her work very well, but she's obviously very sweet and poses for pictures with, like, hearts on her shirt. God bless...it's just not my bag. And it doesn't mean I want to go out there and kill people or something, and it doesn't mean that I'm not extremely sweet under the right circumstances.
But anger management is a struggle for you.
My instinct is that when people attack me, I want to knock their block off. But I don't want a life that's eaten alive by anger or bitterness. It's just not worth it.
Your new fiancé, Brian Warner--aka Marilyn Manson--is one of the most vilified and controversial acts in rock history. But I hear that, in real life, he's a pretty well adjusted person. Has he taught you anything?
He helps me let things go. He taught me not to let things fester inside and to roll with the punches. He's got a really good attitude--he'd have to, when you think about it--about people throwing stones. But the thing with him is, he's not that different from his stage persona. It's not all fake, it's how he expresses himself. He can be really wild at home or not, just like we all can. Well, some of us. [Laughs.]
Okay, I'm intrigued. What do you two do for fun?
Well, actually, we're movie addicts. And he's seen more than I have. We like obscure, goofy stuff. We get really excited when movies like Just One of the Guys and My Bodyguard come on. And we both have a coincidental fascination with Lionel Richie. Y'know, weird stuff. Funny stuff. We make each other laugh a lot.
Gee, a happy home and a booming career. Maybe being Rose McGowan isn't such an extreme psychodrama after all.
Well, something I've really wrestled with is being in what is basically a masochistic business. Because I fell into it accidentally, I spent a good year and a half on the fence, wondering why I would put myself in a position to get the crap kicked out of me and go home crying from auditions and such.
I've always been a very resilient person, but it's interesting to see how one has to develop on a soul level to be in this kind of a business, if you're going to keep grounded and a strong sense of yourself. It's almost, strangely, a more personal journey than a business one, if you will.
