Actress Rose McGowan busts balls in her new black comedy Jawbreaker. As Jessica Rabbit once said — “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” and with a curvy body that even Jessica Rabbit would be envious of, Rose McGowan too has faced similar typecasting.

Known as a “bad girl” for her revealing outfits she wears at awards show and her relationship with “bad boy” Goth rocker Marilyn Manson (they recently got engaged), the most surprising thing upon meeting the 23-year old actress is how “girl next door” she truly is. While outspoken and articulate about topics that concern her, she nonetheless has a very disarming quality about her — she’s filled less with pretension and more with street smarts that bely all that you would expect even to the point of accepting her “bad girl” label for better or worse.

“I guess you have to have something to be guilty about,” admits McGowan. “If it’s being considered a bad girl as opposed to Jennifer Love Hewitt who I don’t really know — she seems very nice and obviously very sweet posing for pictures with hearts on her shirt — god bless her, but it’s not my bag. It’s not meaning that I want to go out there and kill people or something. It also doesn’t mean that I am not extremely sweet although my friends would say so. It’s just a moniker like any other one. And they will figure out another one for the next magazine cover.”

First breaking into the business in Greg Araki’s The Doom Generation, it took a supporting role in Wes Craven’s Scream to push her into the limelight as Neve Campbell’s spunky best friend. Following that with another horror film Phantoms and a handful of little seen art house films, McGowan finally gets her starring role in the sun with the black comedy Jawbreaker.

Written and directed by newcomer Darren Stein, McGowan plays the bitchy leader of a group of high school knock-outs who accidentally kill their best friend on her birthday and try to cover it up. Think Heathers crossed with Sixteen Candles and you get Jawbreaker’s decidedly warped bent.

“Jawbreaker is like Warhol pop art where everything is brightly colored and shiny,” says McGowan. “I liked it because it was a teen movie but I didn’t want to do another teen movie until someone pointed out that someday I wouldn’t be able to play a teenager. I didn’t really want to play the fast talking kind though. This girl is more like the prequel to The Last Seduction. This is Miss Manners finishing school. This is her high school years where she gets to do bad things.”

As evil and manipulative McGowan’s character is in the film, it even threw the actress herself for a loop when she saw the final product.

“While I was watching the movie I was like ‘oh my goodness’ but I thought it was funny,” she says. “She’s so evil and she’s only in high school. I also liked it because it was kind of deviant which I’m always there to promote. I thought it was funny in a very perverse way.”

While many have compared the film to Heathers, McGowan defends Jawbreaker as being its own entity and less derivative of that seminal 1989 flick.

“I don’t think it’s so much like it in terms of people ruling the school, but there are a couple of homages to different pictures in it,” says McGowan. “Any love story you do is going to be like another one in some way or another, so Jawbreaker and Heathers are thematic stories in high school. How many stories are you going to do there really.”

Ironically, McGowan never intended acting to be her chosen profession especially with the frequent ups and downs it presents.

“It’s something I really wrestled with because I knew this is basically a masochistic business and I fell into it accidentally,” says McGowan. “I spent a good year and a half on the fence wondering ‘why am I putting myself into this position to get the crap beaten out of me.’ I was basically going home crying. ‘Ouch, this hurts, let me have more.’ It changed me though in the sense that it has given me a lot of focus. I’ve always been a very resilient person, but it’s interesting just on a soul level to be in this business to keep grounded and have a strong sense of self.”

There’s a lot of learning that comes with this business too observes McGowan especially when it comes to the press and the image “they” want to present of you.

“It’s like reading an article that says something nasty about you,” says McGowan. “You go, ‘that hurts,’ but you learn not to sit around maybe obsessing on it or plotting that person’s demise.”

One subject McGowan is very protective of is of Manson, who she recently became engaged to. What gets her ire the most is when the press dubs him a “freak” and other unmentionable names without knowing who he truly is.

“If someone has an outside opinion of him, it sort of boils over onto me,” says McGowan. “I don’t think he is a freak and I tend to get very protective of him. He’s extremely intelligent and probably the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. Pretty much anyone who is pro-free thought gets battered down in America. I can’t say his vibe isn’t to promote certain reactions, but I think things should be stirred up a little bit and I don’t believe in being boring. I’m kind of against it.”

Boring is one thing McGowan would never be accused of especially with the wide range of parts she’s done over the years – and for better or worse those are the ones that people always walk up and remember her from.

“I still get a lot of people recognizing me from Scream and also people saying ‘I loved you in Phantoms’ and I’m always like ‘Oh really’” McGowan says. “Then I’m like ‘I’m sorry, you liked the movie,’ but you never know what someone is going to remember you from. I actually did this campy thing on HBO called Devil in the Flesh for HBO and a lot of young males say to me ‘I loved it when you killed your grandma’ and I’m like ‘thanks, go away.’ It’s funny when people are really excited about that.”

One film McGowan admits to not being too excited about was last year’s adaptation of Dean Koontz’s popular novel Phantoms starring opposite Ben Affleck and Peter O’Toole (who McGowan playfully refers to as “the love of my life” and admits was the only reason she took the role).

“It was my first time interacting with special effects and it was a difficult shoot,” she admits. “I’m not big on sci-fi stuff, I loved Independence Day, but I did Phantoms for Peter O’Toole. He was very lovely and we’re still friends today.”

With Jawbreaker now in theaters, McGowan is looking to the future, but notes it’s getting harder to choose her parts. While she may have broken through to that next level and can now get into the auditions and actually be considered, she’s at a point where she wants move up even one more notch.

“It’s interesting–I’ve turned down ten things in a row in the past nine months because they haven’t really flipped my switch but the two things I desperately wanted I haven’t gotten,” says McGowan. “So it’s like Murphy’s Law. It’s also kind of like being in a hot house environment that’s really extreme and you are expected to pick yourself off the floor and be like ‘hey you know razzle dazzle.’ It can kind of kick, you around a bit, but you ultimately realize it’s all voluntary.”