In her new movie The Doom Generation, Rose McGowan swears, murders and fucks her way across America. In real life, she goes out with Marilyn Manson. Or is it the other way around?

The girl who was bisected by a garage door in Scream didn’t even see a movie until she was ten years old. She didn’t see a TV, or a freeway, or any of the rest of the United States, either. Born in 1975, Rose McGowan was raised in a cult in Rome, Italy, isolated from the corrupting influences of the industrial/entertainment complex. And young Rose was brought up to be pure. “My parents were weird hippies,” she says. “They didn’t want to be involved in American culture in any way. I didn’t even speak English until I was ten.”

In the late ’70s, the McGowan’s lived communally as members of The Children of God – later known as The Family, one of many groups which opted out of the mainstream in the late ’60s. River Phoenix, his brother Joaquin, and their siblings were raised in the same organization. The Children Of God believed in sexual communalism and freedom from need. On recruitment drives, they would send their women on what members called “flirty fishing” or “happy hooking” excursions. Rose had never known any other way of living but she sensed that there was something peculiar about the Children. She could feel the idealism giving way to mind-control, sexual manipulation and personality-cult power-trips.
“There were a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me,” she says. “Separation of parents and children, a lot of hypocrisy…the stuff I saw going on was very different from what was being preached. I didn’t really have any idea what the other world was like, but I never related at all to what I grew up with at the commune.”
Rose suspects that the thing which made her want to be in the movies was in her back then, too. “If you can have it integrated into your DNA to want red lipstick,” she says, “Then it was definitely in mine.”

Today, Rose McGowan is American’s vamp of choice – part wide-eyed innocent who’s always ready for the slaughter, part gothic tramp on a permanent quest for outrage. She has traded in one Family for another, that of Marilyn Manson, the albino pervert rock star whom she first met at an S&M theme cafe in New York. (A sort of Trent Reznor triple strength, Manson leads a band whose members all take their names from serial killers and models, and is considered the Antichrist by religious conservatives in America. Rose calls him the Doctor. His real name is Brian.)

Rose’s isolation from American movies gave her a strange expertise in playing its female mainstays. In Scream she played the chesty blonde cheerleader destined for a grisly demise; in the ’50s coming-of-age story Going All The Way, she was a black-haired siren who, in her own words, “grinds some poor little bastard’s heart out with my high-heeled shoe”. This month Britain finally gets to see her most extreme (and first) performance with the belated release of The Doom Generation, the murderous 1995 road trip movie by avowedly gay director Gregg Araki which billed itself as “Sex. Murder. Whatever.” Twenty years old at the time, McGowan played Amy Blue, a disaffected, foul-mouthed black hole of a girl, hiding her naiveté and raw panic behind a screen of obscenities and brittle toughness. One of Amy’s key lines was “When nature calls, it fuckin’ hollers!” The film was considered too confrontational for British release until this year. Now the appeal of McGowan’s rising star might get audiences past the blood and guts. Rose’s CV is a portrait-gallery of troubled young women who both crave and fear adulthood: people who, in her words, are “fists up to the world, don’t let anyone know you know nothing, types.”

The Rose McGowan who walks in to The Kitchen, a restaurant-cum-flower stand on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, is a different creature altogether. She takes off her sunglasses and beams a megawatt smile with lips carrying maybe a sixteenth of the lip gloss that her Doom Generation character, Amy Blue, used. Rose is hungry and wants “Food to go…this place gives me the creeps. We’ll go to my house. It’ll be more peaceful because my boyfriend’s looking after my dogs over at his house.” We order takeout pasta and I picture Marilyn Manson taking Bug and Fester for walkies with a plastic dogshit bag in his hand. Rose attempts to pay for lunch with her own credit card, something no actor ever, ever does for a journalist – I’m so surprised that, like a fool, I pay anyway.
We drive back in Rose’s black Ford Explorer to her place a few blocks away, a spacious apartment that’s clean and orderly enough to suggest its owner doesn’t spend much time here. Rose rents it – she likes to keep her options open.

Rose’s life with The Children Of God ended catastrophically in 1985, when her father ran off with the children’s nanny. The six kids were allowed to choose which parent they wanted to go with. Ten-year-old Rose chose her mother and moved to Oregon in the American Pacific North West, half a decade before the grunge boom began. Rose, her mother and her younger brother went to stay with their grandmother. “She was a totally gun-ho American with one of those ‘Buy American’ bumper stickers on her car,” Rose tells me as she passes me pasta and iced water. “She looked like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, and she made us play ‘America The Beautiful’ on her electric organ. Nowadays it might be cool to have an organ, to fuck around with it and make really cool sounds. Back then it was just torture.”

This was the start of McGowan’s roaming adolescences. She criss-crossed the bleak, rainy, lumber-producing states of Oregon and Washington many times in the next few years, never remaining in one place for more than a year. The area, she says, was the home of trailer trash. “I’m sure I’ll get hate mail for this, but the Pacific Northwest is just fucked up in general. You know the region produces more serial killers than anywhere else in America? Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer…And Seattle has the highest suicide rate. If I’d stayed there I might have been among them.”
School – but of course – detested her. Rose had never been to a proper school before, and went to many on series. In the first on she entered, the kids told her she was the ugliest thing they had ever seen. At some, the kids revered and copied her; at others, people would throw things at her from their cars and try to run her over. “But you know what’s funny?” she says. “I used to be made fun of in school for being flat-chested.” Then she lets out the same sarcastic ‘Ha-har!’ as Nelson, arch-bully from The Simpsons. Today, of course, Rose McGowan is the mammophile’s best friend.
By the time she was 15, Rose had left home and lied about her age to work in various bad jobs in various Northwestern cities. For a while she was homeless, sleeping under houses or on a freezing beach in Oregon or just staying up all night in clubs, “Especially gay clubs where the men don’t bother you.” Now she can’t believe she survived it.

“Sometimes I’d black out and have these weird mental time-lapses. I used to sleepwalk in the snow. I remember one time, when I was about 14 and still at home, coming to and I was standing in the middle of a three-lane freeway with people screaming at me from cars going 70 miles an hour. I’m like ‘What the…?’ And I wasn’t even on drugs. I would just space out. It was a weird habit of mine, disassociating from things. Later on I’d just start falling asleep where I stood,” Eventually she saved up enough to enter a beautician’s academy where the work was foul, the old people bad-tempered and the tips miserable – but it taught her enough that she can still do her friend’s hair.

When Rose read Gregg Araki’s script for The Doom Generation in 1994, she thought: that’s me. “Amy Blue was a lot like I was, refusing to feel or deal with anything, which basically leads you to have a breakdown. Then you just have to work your way back to sanity. I remember once looking at all the crazy people in my family, really outlandish and chaotic and emotionally overboard, and alcoholic and drug-addicted – not all of them – and deciding that I’m not gonna be anything like them. So I went to hyper-control Doom Generation mode. I completely related to the script. Just like “Fuck you, world!” I had a lot of pain to cover up. It was an insane shoot, but then again it’s an insane movie.”

The Doom Generation‘s shoot was harrowing for everybody, but especially for McGowan. She’d been hanging around Hollywood and made a couple of split-second movie appearances (look closely and you can see her in California Man). She had no training as an actress when she met a friend of Araki’s outside an L.A. gym, who told her she was just right for the movie. Rose was reluctant about continuing an acting career but she signed on anyway. It turned out she’d been right to be apprehensive.
“Gregg didn’t really have a lot of regard for the female body,” she recalls. “He didn’t think there was any difference in me taking my shirt off than for a guy. I think there’s a difference. We would work, like, 14- or 15-hour days, and it was almost all night shoots. He’d decide to shoot a sex scene at seven in the morning, after an all-night shoot. It was pretty rough and weird. All actors say sex scenes aren’t romantic or erotic, but mine were even worse. It wasn’t like, candlelit and soft music and the curtains blowing. It was pretty rough and tumble.”
What happens in The Doom Generation is that McGowan is passed back and forth like a sex toy between the principal male characters – James Duval as her sleepy Keanu-dumb boyfriend and Jonathan Schaech as the psychotic bisexual hitchhiker who joins them on an L.A. murder/crime spree. Her every other scene is nude, she simulates fellatio, and she is subjected to a simultaneous double-fuck that’s hardly distinguishable from hardcore porn. Now she says she was completely naive in making that movie.

“Not having planned to be an actor, I didn’t have that mentality that says, ‘You can’t do this or it’ll hurt your career.’ I don’t know if I’d be able to do that movie now. I was so emotionally closed off that I was disconnected enough to be able to pull some of it off. Now I think it might be too hard on me.”
Doom Generation proved to be a disconnected movie. On its American release, it was either praised for its cool, ironic detachment or, more commonly, disparaged as a vapid picture reveling in its moral emptiness (the picture begins with the ‘accidental’ murder of a Korean grocery store assistant and carries on from there). But it got McGowan her role as Tatum Riley in Wes Craven’s Scream, the one her life seemed to have prepared her for.

“It was so foreign to my experience,” she says. “The popular pretty girls, the wealthy parents, the nice houses and the cute little outfits… I never went to a normal high school so it was interesting to be able to dye my hair blonde and pretend to go for that Midwestern look and mentality. It’s funny how so much high school stuff carries over into your adult life and you repeatedly go through the same fucking crap. I used to get along by completely overstepping all boundaries and going to the extremes in everything. And if you only know extremes – which is either nothing or everything – you can fuck up your life quite well. That’s when you have to learn to backpedal and learn how the middle works.”

Rose clears away the pasta plates and wonders aloud how The Doctor is getting on with her dogs.