Issue 171, By Anthony C. Ferrante

Every fledgling thespian hopes that they’ll be that one person in a million who will be discovered on the street and whisked away to big-screen stardom. For Rose McGowan, that was literally how her career took off.

“I was just walling down the street when a friend of mine came out of this place with a director named Greg Araki,” explains McGowan, who was at the right place at the right time, since Araki was having problems casting the female lead in his violent teenage road movie The Doom Generation. “A lot of actresses wanted to do it, but their managers would say it was ‘too scary.’ And Greg is very particular. He wanted someone who was a certain height, skin color. I didn’t audition for the film, I didn’t go through an agency or anything like that. He just asked me if I could do this, and I bluffed and said ‘ Of course I can.’ Then I had to live up to that, and I was pretty proud of myself for my performance.”

“Boot camp” is how McGowan affectionately describes that experience, which required her character to take a roller coaster ride of emotion while being placed in sexually provocative situations. “I felt that if I could survive that, I could survive anything,” the actress says. “One of my favorite things is when people always say, ‘ It looked like you had a blast doing that movie,’ and I’m like, ‘Good, I pulled it off,’ because it was actually really, really hard.”

Since that challenging debut, McGowan has shaped up as one of the brightest acting spots in the genre field. Horror audiences fell in love with her as Neve Campbell’s sexy and spunky best friend Tatum in Scream, and this year she appeared as the innocent teenage heroine of Dimension Films’ big-screen adaptation of Dean Koontz’s novel Phantoms. “My little brother adores Koontz, and when I told him I was in this movie he got really excited,” says McGowan. “He said Phantoms was the first Dean Koontz novel he ever read. He couldn’t sleep for a week, and then he made all his friends read it.”

While he was familiar with the material, McGowan chose not to read the book at first, since she figured that her character of Lisa would vary greatly between the two media. “It was different, and I didn’t really want to color my performance,” she explains. “In the book she’s 14, and I’m playing the character at about 17. I did read the book at the end, though, and it was pretty close to what the (movie) character is like.”

In the film, Lisa is the one of two sisters who arrive in a small Colorado town to discover that all the inhabitants have vanished. “Their mom basically has an alcoholic breakdown, and my sister Jenny (Joanna Going) takes me away from her, and I’m resentful about that,” says McGowan. “So she takes me to where she lives in deadsville, which, hey, it turns out to be deadsville, as a matter of fact.”

The party responsible for the disappearances turns out to be a creature referred to as “the ancient enemy,” and gave McGowan her first taste of acting opposite an imaginary creature which would later be placed in digitally. “I never had to act with something that wasn’t there before, and it felt weird for a while,” she recalls. “So I started to remember what it was like when I was little and thought there was a thing under my bed that would reach out and grab my leg. I would have to jump from the doorway to the bed so I wouldn’t get sucked under. That’s how I handled it.”

The rigors of shooting on location in Colorado in freezing temperatures were also a lesson in patience. “It was very odd shooting scenes in the middle of the Rocky Mountains at 3 a.m. in November and December,” McGowan says. “We really should have been waiting for a helicopter rescue instead of waiting for my close-ups. It was rigorous physically, but it was pretty cool too.”

That cool factor especially came into play when she got to work opposite veteran actor Peter O’Toole, who plays tabloid reporter Timothy Flyte, the only person who knows what makes the elusive creature tick. “I’m madly in love with Peter O’Toole,” McGowan raves. “Love. love and more love. He and I got along like white on rice, and together we formed a mutual admiration society. He suggested thing I could do if I was having trouble with dialogue. I also remember asking him if there were millions of girls chasing him around the planet after he did Lawrence of Arabia, and he said, ‘My dear girl, I didn’t need movies to do that.’”

While Phantoms may not have set the box office on fire when it opened in January, McGowan is still frankly surprised by the success of Scream, especially since it opened during the Christmas holidays, which is usually perceived as a death slot for genre films. “I don’t think its success had as much to do with timing as much as people really liking to be thrilled and not pandered to,” McGowan says. “It’s a movie that doesn’t just appeal to one segment, either. I’ve met 80-year-old women who have seen it. The only reason the movie could have made that much money is getting that crossover appeal and people going to see it again. I mean, I’ve had people quote lines from the movie to me that I can’t even remember now.”

While McGowan didn’t make an appearance in Scream 2 (for the obvious reason that she was knocked off in the first one), she cautions not to count her out – there’s always Scream 3. “You never know, there can always be the evil sister,” the actress laughs. “They’ve talked about something like that for the third film, but I don’t know if I would even want to do a Scream 3 by then – only if Wes Craven would direct it, because I just love him. Other than that, I’ve done the horror flick thing, so I think after Phantoms I’ll be laying these movies to rest for now.”