Rose McGowan may play a Prom Queen bitch in Jawbreaker but in real life she wouldn’t hurt a Taco Bell waitress.

by Josh Wolk

In the dark high school comedy Jawbreaker (new in theaters), Rose McGowan plays a teenage dictator who rules the halls with an iron miniskirt and a clenched jaw, hissing “I have the power” at less attractive students. You might think any actress who was engaged to Marilyn Manson (he presented the ring last Friday) would already possess the evil side needed to play a nasty Prom Queen. But McGowan says she’s nothing like the selfish siren she plays on screen. “I have a terrible overempathy thing,” McGowan tells EW Online. “I can’t even go through the drive-through at Taco Bell without thinking, ‘Oh my God, this woman is waiting on me, and she’s got eight kids at home all living in one bedroom. And I’m just here for my burrito! I’m a capitalist pig!’… My life is constant guilt, guilt, guilt, thinking, ‘I should have tipped the waiter more,’ or putting quarters in other people’s parking meters.”

Posing as queen of the cool crowd was a far cry from McGowan’s own teen experience. Her parents were members of a Children of God commune (the same organization River Phoenix’s family belonged to), so she was mostly homeschooled and only attended an Oregon public school briefly, where she was an outcast. “It’s been funny playing upper-middle-class popular girls with all the cute outfits and cute boyfriends,” says McGowan, 23, of her recent roles. “That’s so not a part of my existence at all. By the time I was 15, I was practically living on my own. So (it was weird) playing somebody like Tatum in Scream who wasn’t worried about basic survival issues… Well, until she got caught in the garage door. She had a lot of survival issues at that point.”

If McGowan were to ever return to her old school, there would be scads of teenage boys eager to vote her Prom Queen, judging from the numerous cyber temples (like “Kiss from a Rose”) young bucks have erected to worship her. “It’s funny,” she says of the adulatory pages, “because I always look at them on a day when I’m at home with the flu and my hair is sticking up and I’m wearing old frumpy pajamas, and I’m like, ‘ha ha ha!’”