The out-there pinup queen roars back in this month’s power-packed, double-stacked, throwback thriller Grindhouse – and she’s as thorny as ever.

This month, after a five-year run on the WB’s Charmed, Rose McGowan makes her return to the big screen in Grindhouse, an homage to exploitation films from the ’70s. The film, which includes a double bill by two cult filmmakers (Death Proof, a slasher film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; and Planet Terror, a zombie movie written and directed by Robert Rodriguez), both starring McGowan, is knit together by fake movies trailers designed to duplicate the actual grindhouse experience. Here McGowan unspools her own Grindhouse experience to her Death Proof director.

QUENTIN TARANTINO: So you just finished a long run on the TV show Charmed. What was that like?
ROSE McGOWAN: There are huge positives and huge negatives to doing a TV series: I don’t like to think of all the movie roles I missed, but it was really interesting to follow a character over a period of time. My character was the youngest sister, so I kind of played her like a baby Lucille Ball, but she’s also a bit of a schmuck, who you feel sorry for but still think is kind of hot.

QT: Now that the show’s done I’m sure you’re looking forward to moving on and doing more movie roles, but it’s got to be an adjustment – you’re used doing this one thing every day for five years.
RM: Well, getting up late is so much more my style, so that’s been fantastic. But this is very strange to have to give up what was the kind of family that I never really had growing up. The people on the show know more about me than my best friends at the time did. I miss that a lot, actually. I thought about that a couple of times and definitely teared up. It taught me how to work and function in a family, and how if you have problems with somebody not to just run away. And I kind of wound up playing my off-screen character on the set as well – I filled the role of a person who makes everybody laugh, so they all think I’m this goofy person. Once I stepped into that I couldn’t break out of it. I guess I am funny and goofy but not all the time.

QT: So you come rolling out of Charmed and into Grindhouse – you actually worked with both me and Robert on the film. And, in fact, while you were doing Robert’s movie, you were still doing Charmed, going back and forth between the two. What was that like, hopping back and forth between Paige on Charmed and Cherry on Planet Terror, two completely different characters?
RM: Well, jumping back into the movies with you and then with Robert would be anyone’s dream – I couldn’t have orbed myself to a better place. But physically it was tough. At the end of nine months shooting a series, you’re ground down. Watch any series, and toward the end you see people looking gray – the characters look like they’re about to die. But it was weird to go back to Charmed from shooting Grindhouse, more because of the reaction of the crew and the other cast members than anything else, since I was more in Cherry mode. The whole experience was completely schizophrenic, but in the best way.

QT: When you first read the part of Cherry, what was it about her that grabbed you on to?
RM: More than anything it was the way she related to my own life – not to sound like a victim, but the way you think everything’s working out great, and then something comes and knocks you on your ass. Robert and I have talked about how he fantastic luck, so we call him Four-Leaf; whereas I generally have no great luck, so I call myself Two-Leaf. [Tarantino laughs] And Cherry’s pretty goddamn two-leaf, too, at times going down to negative-one-leaf. I also completely related to her struggles and eventually coming out on top. And the role gave the opportunity to be funny, to cry, and to save the world – that’s usually three different movies.

QT: In your other films I don’t think you’ve ever played an action heroine before. Robert gives you this big heroic moment, when you’re walking with your machine-gun leg, and all this stuff is blowing up around you – it’s like peg-leg Jim Brown in The Dirty Dozen (1967). I can just see the audience cheering when that happens. How did you get into the physical aspect of it?
RM: Robert actually helped me a lot with the walk, and I tried to watch people with one-and-a-half legs around town, but I just felt too cruel staring at them – I’d always turn away in the last minute.

QT: So you finished playing Cherry in Planet Terror, then you moved to play Pam in my film Death Proof. What was switching gears from Cherry to Pam like for you? The characters were quite different.
RM: They were extremely different. You and I had talked about Pam being blonde; I felt that because her face gets hurt just a little bit, I wanted her to look really soft and angelic. Whereas I wanted Cherry to have more of exotic feel, with pale skin, black hair, and red lips. It’s kind of working from outside in: They both needed to have really strong, separated identities; making Pam look soft was a key to the character. The roles were equally fantastic in completely different ways, and obviously it’s anybody’s dream to do two things like that back-to-back – it was like having two different amazing meals.

QT: Also, Pam is kind of a hippie girl, and that’s so not you – one feels like you’ve rejected that your whole life, but here you had to embrace it!
RM: I was like, “Why did Quentin come up with that – just to torture me?” [Tarantino laughs] My mother was like, “Ha-ha, I knew that would get back to you someday,” because when I was little I would hide in the wheel well of the VW bug she drove us to school in, so no one would see me. Everyone else had their station wagons, and she would yell out of the window, “Rose McGowan’s in this car!” I would be mortified and just sink into my seat as far as I could. Even when I was 3 or 4 years old and we were living in a commune, I would look at all these women with their leg hair, and I just knew it was wrong. So my entire family was laughing at me when I was playing this part. I think it’s just some weird hippie karma coming back at me. I always knew they were out to get me. But it was pretty hilarious. I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m wearing a shirt that looks like a tablecloth!”

QT: The way we made the film it actually looks like an old print from the ’70s, so even though you see all this contemporary stuff, it looks like an old print. And you look like an actress from the ’70s, especially with your outfit and your blonde wig. [laughs]
RM: All the girls in the film are dressed kind of cute and modern, and Pam is doing her own thing – she’s going to the Phish concert or whatever, and afterward she’s going to play hacky sack. But it added level of sweetness to her, too. I mean, who wants to hurt somebody with a peace sign?

QT: The other thing is that my set and Robert’s set couldn’t have been more different. As good friends as we are, we go about things in completely different ways. We were actually working with basically the same crew, so when Robert finished with them and started editing, I took over the crew and you came abroad my film. Having worked on both, you can actually describe what’s different about the two movies.
RM: What was really interesting for me was not just how completely different you two are, but the sweet way your friendship and working relationship functions. I think if you two were identical, it wouldn’t snap together so well. Robert’s set was like an office, quieter – his crew tries to keep it as low as possible, because he can seem kind of scary, but that’s mostly because he’s so quiet himself. When people are very quiet around me I think they hate me. But it was interesting to see the same crew on your film – it was like, “Party!” I was like, “I haven’t heard this person speak in five months!” It was just completely different and amusing to watch.

QT: What was your experience like working with Kurt Russell [Russell, who plays the slasher in Death Proof]?
RM: He was fantastic. I find that the farther along and the more secure people are in their careers, the cooler they are. He’s just a cool cat and a good man. In real life I would have wanted him to be my father, though not so much the way he is in the movie.

QT: His dad was a cowboy actor, so Kurt was raised around other tough, macho, cowboy actors and stuntmen.
RM: What was really great about him was his perspective on that and having grown up with a lot of the people back in his father’s day; many of them had real jobs before they made it. It bums me out that the people who seem to be true males, with that certain virility, tend to be older now.

QT: That’s my biggest problem with casting young male actors – you look at The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Dirty Dozen, and you can’t find three of those kind of guys now.
RM: They all seem to come from Australia now – I’m not really sure what they’re putting in the water down there.

QT: Yeah, today you’ve got Vin Diesel, who’s a real tough guy, but other than that you’re dealing with a whole lot of pretty boys. People like Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Jim fucking Brown – they were just falling out of trees back then! [laughs]
RM: I feel that was as an actor. Like, I have to pretend I’m not hot for you? Now, there’s acting! And it’s also funny in TV shows or movies or even on commercials – you’ll see this dorky getting the hot chick. I always think, if I’m going to go out with a dork, let me do it on my own time. [Tarantino laughs]