Rose McGowan, interviewed by Jeanne Wolf
Re shooting from the hip: “I do like firing a gun, but I would never own one. I’m melancholy, and I’m Irish, and that doesn’t work with weapons,” McGowan tells Jeanne Wolf.
Jeanne Wolf dubs Rose McGowan Bullet Babe on Movies.com:
Rose McGowan is a showstopper in Grindhouse, playing Cherry Darling, a stripper who loses a leg and replaces it with a machine gun to fight a bunch of zombies. Rose hasn’t gotten this much attention since she was offed in Scream. Now, after the hit TV series Charmed, she’s back on the big screen in the double feature from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, playing not just the one-legged heroine in Planet Terror but a victim of a serial stalker in Deathproof.
In person, Rose bowled me over. She looks gorgeous, talks fast and has a wicked sense of humor. No wonder Rodriguez and Tarantino loved her (gossip insists that Robert loved her a little too much but there were no confirmations about their romance, which supposedly bloomed during the filming of Grindhouse). I’m betting that Rose’s bravura performance is going to push her toward the A-list.
OK, about that lethal leg “I got a phone call from Robert: ‘Hey, Rose, I’m on my way to see the doctor in Orange County, and I’ve been stuck in traffic for about two hours. It just came to me your character needs a machine-gun leg!’ I was thinking, When I’m in the car, I floss my teeth, do my makeup, talk on the phone. Clearly I need to start writing scripts ’cause maybe then I could make the big bucks.”
How she can help Iraq War vets: “I bet they’re going to really cheer and be happy for somebody that, instead of getting a regular prosthetic, can still take people out with a machine gun. A lot them want to keep going back and fighting with their squads. I wonder if any of them are going to try to figure out ways to do that? Hopefully, I’m inspirational.”
Getting off on shooting from the hip: “I do like firing a gun, but I would never own one. I’m melancholy, and I’m Irish, and that doesn’t work with weapons.”
Facing a near rape from Quentin: “When he tries to sexually assault me in the film, I had this look of horror and disgust on my face he was terrifying. But I knew he would love that. You could put that above his bed: ‘I was disgusting, horrifying and terrifying.’ ”
The admitted queen of useless talents: “I can scrap algae off of tiles like nobody’s business. I was doing that the other day while doing a phone interview. They were like, ‘What are you doing? What’s that sound?’ ‘Scraping algae.’ That’s being a Virgo.”
