She might also get a new home.

“Actually, I was looking at some property today,” the actress (Charmed, Grindhouse) said late last week from the New Orleans set. “You know, I’m on that fence right now in life, and I might throw myself over to New Orleans.”

McGowan has always been a fan of the city, she said. Even before playing Ann-Margret in the Golden Globe-winning mini-series Elvis for CBS, which was shot in town in 2005, she saved up her cash as a 19-year-old and came down for a solo visit — just because it was always something she wanted to do.

This time, though, it might be more than just a visit.

“I’m kind of at this strange crossroads in my life. I’m trying to figure out where I want to be,” McGowan said. “And I love Los Angeles in the sense that I love my friends there and I love my life there, but the business 24-7 just grinds on you. There’s no escape for you. I notice that my self-esteem and my general sense of well-being is much higher when I’m not there, and it’s sort of sad to live your life somewhere that makes you sad.”

New Orleans, on the other hand, with its deeply ingrained eccentricities and its slower pace of life is appealing to the actress. “I think it’s the mix of it all,” she said. “New Orleans is a whole grab-bag of great.”

And something not so great? That McGowan had to leave New Orleans just before Halloween weekend to do publicity in Los Angeles for another project, the Lifetime movie The Pastor’s Wife.

“You don’t even know how sad this is for me,” she said. “Because last year I was supposed to be here for Halloween, and I had a custom-made (Marie Antoinette) gown and wig and all this stuff — spent $4,000. It was so stunning. And then the trip got cancelled at the last minute, and it’s such a downer just wearing it in L.A.”

But maybe McGowan-as-Marie-Antoinette will soon be able to lassez le bon temps rouler in New Orleans, as intended.

“It’s still there, waiting to be resurrected at my house. But you know, New Orleans is the kind of place where I could just wear that on any Tuesday or Wednesday and I’d be just fine.”

The Tell-Tale Heart, directed by John La Tier and starring Patrick John Flueger and Peter Bogdanovich, will continue shooting through Nov. 10. It is eyeing a 2012 release date.

You got your start with the Doom Generation …

So you’ve seen my breasts. Odd now, sitting across from me, right? It’s occasionally what pops into my head when someone says, “I loved the Doom Generation.” We’re on unequal footing now.

It really came out of nowhere.

It really did. It came out of nowhere for me, and I really had no idea what I was doing or what I was participating in. It was like movie boot camp. Gregg Araki would go around clapping his hands saying, “Work harder faster! Work harder faster!” And I thought everybody said that on every set. They would put a mark down on the floor, and I didn’t even know what that meant.

In Conan the Barbarian, you get to play with some pretty fun weapons.

That’s fun, great fun. I think just as a girl I’m so consistently underestimated, especially because I weigh, like, 103 pounds. People treat you like you’re this little doll. I’m like, my brain — which I think is why I’m always so injured — is not in line with what my body is like. So I’m like Scrappy Doo out there, fighting the big guys, which is why I always wind up getting hurt, because I have this unfortunately delicate frame.

With you being in Conan, does this mean you can’t be Red Sonja?

I can’t do that based on my injury. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth paralysis — being that I was paralyzed in my right arm from a stunt gone wrong. I had three surgeries in my wrist, three in my elbow, part of the elbow bone out. There’s points where you’re like, “OK, there are real-life situations and there are movie situations.” And I’ve done things on film to save a shot. There was a huge camera up on a crane — this was on Death Proof — and it was supposed to swing its arm, and out of the corner of my eye I saw it just falling, just swooping really fast. I should’ve just ducked out of the way, but I didn’t want to ruin the shot, so I just turned my head to side and just laughed. And it literally just whipped through my hair. It would’ve probably decapitated me. And also on Death Proof, I didn’t want a double to do all the face slamming against the window, so that was all me. I almost shattered my cheekbone. But it looked cool!

Might I suggest you should do some dramas instead?

I just did one! Although actually I got the crap beaten out of me for about two weeks straight by my husband in the movie, now that I think about it. It was hard not going, “I’m going to kick your ass now,” because I’m used to that instead of just taking it like a mouse.

So does the injury mean you’re looking for fewer genre roles?

I will always. I’m a fighter, what can I say? And it’s also just great fun. I love flying on wires and things being blown up around me and things lighting on fire. That’s the fun part of what I do. I don’t have to sit behind a desk. “What did you do at work today?” “Well… I flew over a 30-foot wall with a giant mushroom cloud explosion behind me. Half my hair burned off, but it looked fantastic!”

I’m pretty much shocked, sometimes, that I’m an actress,” Rose McGowan says. “It’s like I went off on the wrong path and here I am, and I’m not really sure what to do about it. But I have a lot of fun at the end of the day.

“The part that’s the most stressful is not knowing what, if anything, is around the corner, and the best part is having no idea what’s coming around the corner.”

Whip-smart, funny, controversial and unafraid to speak her mind, McGowan has combined genuine talent with a flare for the dramatic and provocative, on screen, in her fashion sense and in her personal life. In her 20-plus years in the public eye, she has acted in everything from Encino Man (1992), The Doom Generation (1995) and Scream (1996) to Charmed (2001-2006), Grindhouse (2007), Nip/Tuck (2009) and the upcoming Conan the Barbarian, donned more than a few memorable and memorably revealing outfits, romanced Marilyn Manson, Ahmet Zappa and filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, and been the subject of tabloid rumours suggesting that she has gone under the knife in an effort to appear younger.

Speaking by cell telephone from somewhere in Los Angeles, McGowan – who will turn 38 in September – readily acknowledges that she has led a colorful life. That said, she finds the attention paid to her alternately amusing and annoying.

“It depends on the day,” McGowan says. “That’s the best way to describe it. I can get really annoyed by it. I was in a really bad car accident a couple of years ago, and my under-eye got ripped open and my whole face flipped forward. Well, the flaps flipped forward – try to say that three times. But there was a big scar under my eye, and they did plastic surgery. Ever since, there have been these really annoying things like, ‘Oh, she’s had her nose done, or this done.’

“I’ve lost weight and I’ve gotten older,” the actress says. “I started as a little, round-headed thing and I definitely weigh five to six more pounds, which makes a big difference on a smaller frame. Of course I look different. Everybody does as they just change.

“Also,” she adds, “unless you watched Charmed specifically, for five years I was largely out of the public eye, because I didn’t do a lot of photo shoots or go on television much to promote it. In retrospect that was probably a bad idea, but I’d never done television and I’d always heard that people can get really identified as their television character and that it can be very hard to get jobs afterward. So I tried to go against that.

“I came out of Charmed and, if you didn’t watch that, it seemed that all of a sudden I looked totally different, but that’s just because five years had gone by.”

McGowan is on the phone to talk about Conan the Barbarian. Set for release on Aug. 19 and based on the pulp-fiction saga created by Robert E. Howard, the film follows the eponymous hero (Jason Momoa) as he seeks vengeance against Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), the power-mad villain who killed his father. McGowan plays the villainess Marique, a half-human/half-witch who also happens to be Zym’s approval-seeking daughter.

“I think Marique absolutely cares more about winning the approval of her father (than killing Conan),” McGowan says. “The studio was really nervous. They cut down some moments that shaped the relationship of the characters. She really quite inappropriately loves her father, and he’s obsessed with resurrecting his dead wife. So in some ways that’s really cool. It gives it more pathos than the simple story of the guy who wants all the power or wants to kill Conan so he can have all the power in the world and blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing.

“He’s just really terribly distraught over his dead wife and he wants to resurrect her,” the actress says, “and I’m jealous of my dead mother. And for that I kill.”

McGowan sports a typically exotic, otherworldly look in Conan the Barbarian, from her costume and hair to her skin and talon-spiked fingers. Achieving that look required as long as six hours daily in a makeup chair.

Sure, it got draining, McGowan admits, but it was worth the time spent.

“If anybody else was tired, I was like, ‘Listen, chump, why don’t you get here at 2 in the morning and we’ll talk about tired, OK?,”‘ she says, laughing. “It was interesting, because a lot of people sleep during the makeup process, and I couldn’t, because it was so critical that I not move a muscle.

“‘M.T.’ has always been my nickname in makeup chairs,’’ McGowan adds, “because I’m a moving target. I’m always turning my head and seeing what’s going on. I have a really hard time sitting still. I just get so bored and I don’t want to be in the chair anymore. But I was very impressed with (makeup supervisor) Scott Wheeler. Scott is immensely talented, and his team had some people from Bulgaria and some from the States, and they were all so amazing.

“I owed it to them to sit in the chair,” she concludes, “and I wanted to look as good as possible as Marique. I wanted her to look flawless. And I think she’s quite majestic in her own way.”

Conan the Barbarian was shot in Bulgaria, with much of the filming done outdoors, on location. McGowan credits German director Marcus Nispel for masterfully juggling the location challenges, a huge cast, nonstop action, loads of FX, a largely Bulgarian crew and …

“A lot of producers and that (crazy) accent,” McGowan says, laughing again. “You know, Marcus was there with his orange pants and his bucket hat and this ridiculously long beard that he refused to shave while he was doing the movie. So pretty much his neck had gray beard hair shooting sideways. He refused to shave it while he was filming. And he always had a smile on his face, no matter what.”

McGowan plays an evil sidekick with a bizarre twist in the R-rated reboot of Conan the Barbarian, which opens in theatres Aug. 19.

Not only did the 37-yearold reinvent the motivation of the former male character, she decided to hint at a forbidden sexuality. She also developed an unforgettable Goth-like witchy woman, which seemed just about right for the fantasy.

Loosely based on the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger flick, the revamped, Marcus Nispel-directed picture more loyally references Robert E. Howard’s stories from the 1930s. In other words, the sword fights are bloody nasty and ragingly violent, and there is an erotic tone to the production, underscored by bare breasts and a sex scene.

Yet McGowan’s Marique does her own subverted thing as the manipulating sorceress, defending her obsessed father Khalar Zim (Stephen Lang) against the vengeful Conan (Jason Momoa).

In the opening sequences, the audiences gets to see why Conan wants Zim dead. In pursuit of an evil power, Zim wipes out a warrior tribe, murdering Conan’s father (Ron Perlman). As the barbarian matures, he plots his single-minded revenge with assistance from Tamara (Rachel Nichols), a monk running for her life.

Along the way, buckets of blood are spilled in graphic confrontations. But German filmmaker Nispel says he always wanted his remake to be a great deal more risque than the Schwarzenegger version.

“If you don’t get the R-rating, you don’t tap into the primal instinct,” says the director, who also remodelled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003 and 2009′s Friday the 13th.

That’s why McGowan seemed like an appropriate addition to the Conan cast, although she added more flair to her performance than expected.

“Rose understands how to be sinister and sexy,” Nispel says of her Marique. “And she really gets her audience.”

Occasionally, she had second thoughts about her look in the movie, though. The partly digital makeover, which includes a high forehead and no eyebrows, took six hours to apply. That meant McGowan had to be up by 2: 30 a.m. daily.

“It’s the ultimate mullet,” says McGowan of the facade. “That could be the most punk-rock haircut a girl could have.”

McGowan began her unique journey with a cameo in the 1982 comedy Encino Man. A celebrated part in 1995′s The Doom Generation was her breakthrough, eventually winning her an Independent Spirit Award for best debut performance.

A supporting role in the hit horror movie Scream established her among mainstream fans, but she followed that notoriety with a string of indie flicks, such as Southie, Going All the Way, Lewis & Clark & George, Phantoms, and Jawbreaker. In 2007, she starred in Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double bill. She was the lead in Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and a co-star in Tarantino’s Death Proof.

An injury on the set of Planet Terror, and an illness in her family, kept her out of movies for a few years. But she’s back at it full throttle.

In fact, she just wrapped The Pastor’s Wife, a TV movie about a real-life church lady who murdered her pastor husband in 2006. McGowan plays the wife, which she admits is the polar opposite to her Conan character.

“The outfits were fashion birth control,” she says. “But she’s an amazing person to play, and I was flattered that they thought of me, because I don’t wear anything tight, which is so rare.”

Many people came to know actress Rose McGowan through the hit TV seriesCharmed, in which she played a witch. Others remember her short but impactful scene in the very first Scream movie, when she was crushed to death by a garage door while caught in a pet hatch. McGowan has never been one to shy away from challenging roles, such as that of Cherry Darling, who had a machine-gun leg, in Robert Rodriguez’ and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. The actress also turned heads at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards in an almost-invisible dress, covering her behind with only a few strands of rhinestones and leaving little to the imagination. And she dated shock-rocker Marilyn Manson for three and a half years, reinforcing her image as a gloomy goth screen goddess. Next up: a turn as a sorceress in Conan the Barbarian.

Your new movie, Conan the Barbarian, is coming out soon. I believe you’re playing an evil witch.
Not quite. She’s half sorceress, half human. She’s kind of strangely in love with her father and will do anything to please him.

So she’s got a bit of an Electra complex?
Yes, she has a complete Electra complex, not just a bit [laughs]. But it’s good. It adds some pizazz to the role.

Did you enjoy making the movie? You all had very interesting costumes.
I actually had a blast. I had so much fun, and believe me, there were moments when I was just kind of standing outside of my body, looking at the whole situation and just thinking, “What must we look like for people who have no idea what is going on? We look so insane right now.” But we just had a blast. It’s quite a spectacle.

I heard that you spent some six hours in the make-up chair.
Yeah, I started at two in the morning, and then I started work with everybody else around seven or eight, depending…and then it took an hour to take off afterwards. I think she looks pretty amazing. She’s very majestic.

You’ve portrayed a number of roles over the years, and you somewhat specialise in bigscreen vamps. What would be your dream role?
I can’t time travel, but my dream role would have been Barbara Stanwyck in DoubleIndemnity or Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. As far as that’s concerned now, I would like to do something silly in front of my bridesmaids. I can’t say that’s a dream role, but it would be fun to switch gears.

What are you currently working on?
I’m about to go and do a television movie for JJ Abrams’ father [Gerald], and it’s a total switch of gears to play this woman. It was a big, sensational case in the United States. There was this pastor and his wife, and she was very meek and mousy looking, very frumpy and middle American. And nobody can exactly explain why, but she shot him in the back. So the movie is all about her trial. It’s interesting that this person could not be less vampy.

I guess many people would argue that you have a little bit of a wild side.
You would be wrong.

So how much of that image is actually you?
Well, if you actually think about it, I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never been busted for drugs, never got arrested for drunk driving, never gotten out of the car without my underwear on. There’s actually nothing that I have done in my life that would actually fit the bad-girl image. That’s the funniest part of it all, and all of my friends know. That’s why they laugh.

What would you say has been your most memorable role so far?
Personally what I’ve found the most gratifying, for sure, was doing the Grindhousemovies, and Cherry Darling specifically, the character with the machine-gun leg.

Do you think it’s becoming tougher and tougher, especially for women in your industry, to look the part and be a certain way? Is there much pressure?
I read somewhere, I can’t remember which actress though, but she said that if she wasn’t acting, she would be one or two sizes bigger. I don’t know. I might be one size bigger, maybe. I’m not sure. I work out really hard, and I like that. I try to just stick my head in the sand, because I start hating everything if I start thinking about it too much. So I just kind of pretend that it doesn’t exist. And I travel a lot. I’m not in Los Angeles very often.

The Conan the Barbarian premiere is coming up soon, but I read that you hate premieres.
It’s not that I hate them. They make me sick to my stomach. I get ill. I just suck it up, but I’ve gone down the red carpet with people and they tell me to stop vibrating, because I start shaking so hard. You can’t tell from the photos, but when they’re screaming at you, and you’re basically stepping out for the world to judge you, it makes me sick to my stomach every time.

Tell us something that nobody knows about you.

I have the ugliest pyjamas in the world, because they’re huge and because they have things like dogs printed all over them, or cows and sheep. Half the time they have a hole in the knee, and I’m really cold. I take the bottoms and tuck them over the top. I put the shirt inside. My friend is literally like, “I don’t know how you get anybody to sleep with you.” [Laughs] There’s something I like about having the same kind of pyjamas I had when I was nine years old. I can’t help myself. Only my good, good friends know that. They’re like, “What a way to ruin an image!”

These days, that’s pretty much everyone. The film industry is one in which collective amnesia is so profound that it’s safe to conclude that half the reason you are only as good as your last picture is that no one can remember further back.

“It breaks my heart that so many people in the film industry have no clue who paved the way for them,” the actress Rose McGowan said. “There’s almost a willful ignorance on their part.”

So she would hardly be surprised if a studio executive walked into her Beverly Hills, Calif., bungalow and, upon seeing the letters R, K and O hanging on her wall, wondered what the heck they stood for. Her own personalized spin on the TKO? After all, the actress is not known for pulling her punches, nor does she as the villainous Marique in next Friday’s release of Conan the Barbarian.

But no. It turns out that back in the day, there was a whole movie studio called RKO. Who knew?

Ms. McGowan, of course. A serious devotee of the Hollywood golden age of the 1930s and ’40s, and a not-so-serious collector of its memorabilia, she was going through a dealer’s warehouse when she happened upon the four-foot-high Art Deco initials, glossily lacquered the color of a wine-red lipstick. She stopped dead in her tracks.

“My heart was racing,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Holy hell, I’ve found the old RKO letters.’ I kind of freaked out. It’s always been one of my favorite studios.” She promptly bought the letters and installed them in the entryway of her former house, which she described, blithely quoting the famous opening monologue from the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, as “one of those California Spanish houses people were nuts about 10 or 15 years ago.”

“That’s my favorite opening ever,” she added.

That film, loosely remade as Body Heat in 1981, was a Paramount picture. But Ms. McGowan noted that in the ’40s, RKO was famous for its film noir releases, many of them starring the laconic antihero Robert Mitchum. (A high point was Out of the Past in 1947, loosely remade in 1984 as Against All Odds.) She pointed out that in the ’30s, RKO also had a great run of screwball comedies — foremost among them, Bringing Up Baby in 1938.

Ms. McGowan is the rare actress who manages to land somewhere between femme fatale and madcap heiress. (She’s quick to quote Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”) If there is any actress she identifies with, it’s Barbara Stanwyck. “I love how she could play sexy and funny, and how she never stopped working,” she said. She also noted that she recently suffered an injury trying to pick grapefruit in her backyard in high heels.

And, most notably, one of the decade’s most memorable screen characters was created with her in mind: Cherry Darling in Planet Terror (2007), the game girl who replaces her amputated leg with a machine gun so she can kick some zombie tail.

“That was the closest to me, I think,” she said. “I got to use all these useless talents I never can otherwise.”

RKO was also the studio that made King Kong, Citizen Kane and those Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. As this list suggests, she said: “RKO was always a bit schizophrenic. They kind of just threw stuff at the wall to see what stuck.”

As someone who has tried a similar tack with her own career, Ms. McGowan feels a certain kinship with the often random-seeming output of RKO. She even has a fascination with the studio’s strange demise at the hands of Howard Hughes, who bought it in the late ’40s and ran it into the ground in just a few years. “The color of the letters seems very Howard Hughes,” she said, referring to his penchant for sultry actresses like Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth. “He was the ultimate eccentric. He had women stashed all over town.”

Today, stashed herself in a pink-painted bungalow in Beverly Hills, Ms. McGowan can almost live out the dream of an RKO contract player in the old studio system, where movies were churned out (some good, some bad), and no one ever looked back.

At least one thing has not changed since then: no one looks back now, either.

Since her 1995 breakthrough role in Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, Rose McGowan has scared up trouble and terror in films such as Scream, Jawbreaker, andGrindhouse. Now playing another witch in Conan the Barbarian, which muscles into theaters August 19, the 37-year-old Charmed alum continues to cast a wicked spell on gay fans.

The Advocate: Something tells me that the gay audience is going to love Marique, your Conan villainess.
Rose McGowan: While spending six hours in makeup every day, I thought, I can’t wait to see the boys and girls do Marique for Halloween in West Hollywood. She’s quite majestic and beautiful in an otherworldly way.

Jason Momoa, who plays Conan, isn’t too shabby either. When I see him in the movie, am I more likely to be aroused or develop a case of body dysmorphic disorder? 
Aroused. Jason’s ass is epic. When I saw his backside naked, I was like, Oh, my. He’s got a beautiful body, because it’s not all Mr. Steroid. He looks raw and masculine.

Are you into big muscles?
I like people who are fit. I figure if I work out, you can at least return the favor. Would I go out with a meathead? No.

Back to the WeHo boys and girls, what was your earliest exposure to gay people?
When I came to the states from Italy around the age of 10, there would always be kids in school picked on for being different. I was as well — every day I’d hear, “You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” and people would throw things at me out of their cars — but I didn’t care, so I’d fight back on behalf of the other kids. Looking back, I get it now that many of them were most likely gay. At 13, when I was a runaway, I was taken in by the most amazing drag queens in Portland, Ore. We didn’t always know where our next meal was coming from, but there was so much camaraderie and love. Not to mention, those girls could paint a face, and I learned how because of them.

Did they take you out to clubs?
Yeah, and I looked like I was about eight. I could finagle my way into lots of different places. Whether it was how I danced or the way I looked, I was always quite celebrated in the gay clubs. To this day, I only go to gay clubs. I’m perfectly at home there. I also like watching hot boys and hot girls who can dance.

Are you bisexual?
No. I disappoint myself. I’ve never even kissed a girl. Isn’t that funny? The girls I think are cute look like guys, but then I think, But if they open their shirt, they’ll have breasts. You know that guy Brad [Goreski], who was Rachel Zoe’s assistant? I’d be attracted to a girl version of him.

That admission alone may make you an honorary member of the LGBT community.
I was actually gay-bashed once. When I was with the drag queens, I had really short hair — sometimes they’d dress me up as Charlie Chaplin, just for fun — and I got clocked coming out of a gay club. But it was awesome, because my boys beat the hell out of those people, and it’s that kind of shit that’s made me a fighter for equal rights and for anybody’s humanity.

Even before you lived with drag queens, you had an unconventional upbringing, growing up in an Italian chapter of the Children of God cult. How did your family influence your views on gay people? 

My whole family’s incredibly liberal. We were always for the underdog, and that’s the number one thing that has shaped my life. I’ve also been that underdog, and I’m still the underdog in a lot of ways, certainly in my business.

As a vocal supporter of marriage equality, you participated in the No H8 Campaign.
My sister is gay. Before I broke up with my fiancé, it seemed absurd to have my sister at a wedding that she couldn’t have if she wanted to. I would still have great hesitation about getting married. I’d feel like such a hypocrite, walking down the aisle past all of my best friends who can’t. I was furious with how horribly the whole Prop. 8 campaign was run in California. It broke my heart the night Prop. 8 passed. I’m out there on Santa Monica Blvd. with crowds of people, and the world is watching, but all the anti-Prop. 8 protestors did was put up the same non-telegenic people with the same speeches, not understanding how it works. Their money was totally mismanaged. I really want California to get it together like New York has.

Thanks for your support, Rose.
You’re welcome. I don’t know how much solidarity there is in the gay community within the political spectrum here. I actually told a bunch of my gay friends recently, “None of you guys have marched for any of your own causes. None of you have sat out at night, hollering, carrying placards.” I’ve decided I’m going to come up with some straight causes so they can return the favor.

How did your sister come out to you?
It was just a natural thing. It never occurred to me that she was gay or that she wasn’t. Although at one point, after dating women, she was scared to tell me that she was going out with a guy. It actually freaked me out, and I stopped speaking to her for three months. Now, thank God, she’s back to women, and life is good again.

That almost sounds heterophobic.
It’s not that I don’t have straight friends, but en masse they make me uncomfortable — especially a bunch of straight men. I was at a party recently, and I started getting really twitchy and weird. My friend was like, “What is wrong with you?” I realized that it was all the straight people. I was like, “These are not my people. I have to leave.”

In a 2009 VanityFair.com piece called “My Gays,” you listed stylist George Kotsiopoulos as one of your gay besties. Now that he’s on E!’s Fashion Police with Joan Rivers and Kelly Osbourne, has he criticized your outfits?
He did once. Other than him, I’d hope all those people, because of how they look, would rip apart my fashion. If they liked how I looked, it would mean I’d be palatable in Ohio, and Ohio can go fuck itself.

You also mentioned your lesbian assistant in the article.
I have a different one now. [Laughs] I had one for four years, and now I have a new one. She and her friends — they’re all exes of each other — are an unbelievable family. It’s a group effort: If my fridge breaks down, one of them is here with an ice chest in 15 minutes. It’s a great club I’ve been invited into without having to be a lesbian. I totally have my own little L Word. We go to lesbian nightclubs a lot.

 Do women hit on you?
No. I got molested one night, but unless they’re really drunk, I think girls are scared of me. My sister says I have no gay vibe, which offended me. I don’t even know what that means. Do I have an invisible penis on my head?

Describe a typical interaction with a fan at a gay bar.
There’s a lot of quoting of my movies. But that’s good, because it’s like a flashback. I’m always like, “Oh, that’s right! What a great line.”

I’d probably quote Jawbreaker, which is certainly a gay fan favorite.
Well, gay men love their bitches. “I made you and I can destroy you just as easily.” How’s that for a line reading? I so want to do a sequel to Jawbreaker. I know everyone says, “I’m really the nicest person,” but I actually am one of the nicest people. That said, I watch a ton of old films, and I fashioned Courtney, my character in Jawbreaker, after Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven. She basically offed everyone who was in her boyfriend’s life, but she also had great witty lines. You’re not going to get that in a typical mainstream American comedy, where, as a girl, I’m going to be a sidekick to the straight man, which is pretty boring.

You’ve definitely managed to avoid boring female roles.
Honestly, I’ll agree to do movies, thinking I’m going to do the man’s role, and when I get to the set it’s like, Oh, right, I’m the girl. I have an intense amount of jealousy that I’m not a man. And I’d vastly prefer to be a gay man. Unfortunately, that’s not how the cards were dealt, and I’m stuck dealing with emotionally underdeveloped straight men. It doesn’t seem fair, really.

Starting with queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki, you’ve had a fortuitous connection with gay male filmmakers like Scream’s Kevin Williamson and Jawbreaker’s Darren Stein. You also worked with Ryan Murphy in Nip/Tuck’s final season. 
You’re right. I’ve never thought about the amount of gays I’ve worked with, but thank God for that. It’s kismet, and it probably has to do with shared sensibility. There’s always been an unspoken mutual affinity there. If I could, I would seek out and only work with gay people.

Yet you’ve never played a gay role.
I’ve never been offered one. I’d be stoked to do a lesbian love scene. When asked if I’ve kissed a girl, I could finally say, “Why, yes, I have. And I got paid.”

If you were to play a lesbian, whom would you want to play your love interest?
Whenever someone asks if I have a crush on any male actors, the problem is that I only like people who are dead, like Robert Mitcham or Cary Grant. So my answer to you would have to be someone like Ava Gardner. I will not be a cliché and say Angelina Jolie.

Have you kept in touch with Ryan Murphy after Nip/Tuck? Your singing skills would be put to good use as a guest star on Glee.
Right? I’d be great on Glee. I’m not sure if Ryan knows I sing. Hello, Ryan. Let’s start a grassroots effort.

I smell a Facebook campaign.
You should start one. Me and Betty White. By the way, you want to know the last time I cried? When the guy who wrote the theme song for The Golden Girls died.

You played Ann-Margret in the 2005 miniseries Elvis. Did you ever hear from her about your portrayal?
I didn’t. But if I ever meet her, hopefully it won’t be too strange. That was a great experience, but it was tough. It’s probably much easier to portray someone who’s not alive.

You’re starring in the upcoming thriller Rosewood Lane, which was written and directed by Powder’s Victor Salva, whose films often reflect his gay sensibility and outsider mentality. Is that the case with Rosewood Lane?
I don’t think so. And I do not have good clothes in that film either; I had to wear office-lady clothes and it killed me. That was an interesting dynamic, because Victor had never done a movie with a female lead, and he was uncomfortable. He really doesn’t relate to women well. He was open about that, which was slightly jarring, because I don’t really know what to do with that information.

Well, Salva is a convicted and registered sex offender, which might account for some social awkwardness.
Yeah, I still don’t really understand the whole story or history there, and I’d rather not, because it’s not really my business. But he’s an incredibly sweet and gentle man, lovely to his crew, and a very hard worker.

You’ve been attached to a number of other projects with strong gay appeal, but they haven’t come to fruition. What’s going on with Black Oasis, a biopic about 1950s B-movie actress Susan Cabot by gay filmmaker Stephan Elliott of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert fame?
That one kills me, because it’s probably one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. Somebody came on board and wanted to produce it, but they could only do it for x-amount more money and it convoluted the whole process. Hopefully, if that person goes away, it can get back on track. You guys would die for this movie. You know what? You’ve inspired me. I’m going to call Stephan.

You were also attached to star in Robert Rodriguez’s Barbarella remake.
Barbarella was also heartbreaking, because we had $85 million to shoot in Germany. Robert, unfortunately, did not want to shoot in Germany, so that’s why that fell apart, and it sucked.

You’ve also been rumored as a frontrunner to play Ginger in a Gilligan’s Islandmovie.
I’ve never heard anything about that, and I don’t know how that rumor started. But if they did make a Gilligan’s Island movie, they would probably cast, like, Jessica Biel.

Are you still attached to Red Sonja?
No. I had a severe injury in my right arm and had to have surgery three times on my elbow — part of my elbow bone has been taken out — so if I get hurt again on that arm, there’s nothing more they can do for me. I’ve decided not to get into any sword battles, because it could mean permanent paralysis, which is ultimately not worth it. It makes me very upset.

What’s the status of your involvement with Women in Chains!, the TV prison series created by boyfriends Josh Miller and Mark Fortin?
There was the possibility of doing it at Showtime for a little bit, but The L Word was going on, and then they were thinking of doing another prison show — people don’t realize all the factors and power struggles behind the scenes. I’m actually about to spend the weekend with Josh and Mark. You know, I was with Josh in L.A. when Gregg Araki’s best friend saw me and decided that I would be perfect for The Doom Generation. He knew Josh and called him repeatedly to get a hold of me to go in and meet with them in the Valley. I didn’t know if I wanted to be an actor, and I was like, “Ugh, I don’t want to drive to the Valley.” After a week, Josh said, “Get off your ass and go meet Gregg Araki!” So aside from being one of the closest people in my life, Josh is one of the primary reasons I’m talking to you today.

You’re very active on Twitter, which is always getting celebrities into trouble. Do you censor your tweets?
My God, the things I could say if I were anonymous! And the pictures I could post? Oh, if I had free reign, I’d be a publicist’s nightmare. If a magazine says something about me that’s totally b.s., I or my publicist can make them print a retraction, which may publish later on page 42, but it’s already all over the Internet and the damage is done. When you’re a verified Twitter user, your tweets go out to all the press outlets, so I can refute something instantaneously. As a celebrity, it’s the only voice I have. There’s nothing more frustrating than reading something untrue like, “Rose McGowan was drunk and in a dance-off on a bar top with Christina Aguilera,” which the New York Post wrote about me once. I’m sure I would’ve won, but that’s something else entirely.

That the 37-year-old actor finds solace in savagery isn’t too surprising when one considers her career. McGowan, who has starred in such seminally twisted films as The Doom Generation, Scream, and Jawbreaker, will next appear as a wicked enchantress in the big-budget remake of Conan the Barbarian, out August 19. “I’m so impressed by how insane and magnificent I look in the film,” she says. “I was in prosthetics for five hours each day, from 2 until 7 in the morning. The whole experience was otherworldly and beautiful, and I really loved what was being created. It was nice to feel that way.”

McGowan hasn’t been involved in a high-profile project since the 2007 release of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s giddily trashy double-feature. When asked about her absence, she says, “I took two years off because my father died. I pulled out of three films to deal with it. We had $85 million to shoot Barbarella in Germany, but Robert [Rodriguez, to whom McGowan was engaged until they split in 2009] didn’t want to shoot there.”

Her personal tumult over the past few years seems to have colored her taste in music (with, perhaps, the exception of the final entry on this list), but McGowan politely dismisses the idea. “It’s basically just the ADD playlist in my brain,” she says. “I can go from listening to Eminem to AC/DC to Patsy Cline in a half hour.” Or, you know, a song about bloodsucking vampires in the Big Easy.

Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)”
How sexy is this song? It’s so playful and dark, and it’s very New Orleans. I’ve often thought I’d make a pretty great vampire, and I always feel at home in New Orleans—with the spirit and the people. When you’re walking around Oak Alley Plantation at night surrounded by the heavy scent of magnolia trees, playing this song on repeat, it’s pretty heady stuff.

Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait”
This one reminds me so much of waiting by the mailbox. My parents are divorced, and when I was a kid I used to wait for letters from my mom when I was at my father’s house. He had a winding driveway and I remember taking long walks down to the end of it, and sitting out there by the mailbox all day. There’s such longing in this song for a time when you’re young and things are simple. Forget waiting by the mailbox—who even writes letters anymore? It makes me so sad, because it’s such a classy, genteel thing to have a nice set of personalized stationery. Not long ago, some douche at a restaurant sent over to my table a bottle of wine, so I sent him back a bowl of soup. You have to be creative in your thanks sometimes.

La Roux’s “In for the Kill (Skream Remix)”
This song is so dusty. Listen to it while lying on your couch after you’ve been up all night having fun with your friends. I’m not involved in nightlife—never really was—but that’s often been a great misconception about me. I’d rather spend time at my friends’ houses playing backgammon. I love backgammon.

Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman”
This one can make me cry. We’re no longer in an era when people dedicate things to each other on anything but AM radio, but somebody I used to love—I won’t tell you who—would play this song and say that it was all about me. The woman Billy Joel is singing about clearly has the upper hand.

Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”
Haven’t we all had that relationship? The one I apply it to wasn’t so much about my being scorned; it was more like he scorned a situation that could have been so amazing and beautiful, but this is what he did and this is who he left. It was a case of this person being unable to be anything but himself, which was unacceptable. I didn’t want to include too many crybaby songs, but that’s exactly what I’ve done, huh? I’ll sit in my car playing this one over and over again, crying, and then I’ll think, My garage smells funny and I’m feeling awfully lightheaded! Oh, yeah, I’ve been sitting in here with the engine on, crying to this song for 30 minutes.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” Featuring Kylie Minogue
When I was little, I used to choreograph ballets in my head that I set to pretty much any song I’d been listening to. I still do that, but now it’s with ideas about how it would look on film. I can no longer separate film visions from my audio pleasure. When I go on a trip and see something—a view or a landmark—I think, It looks just like it does in the movies. I just got back from Auschwitz. I truly think, had I heard a German accent anywhere in my vicinity, I would have lunged at them and killed them. There was a point, when I came across the room filled with all the babies’ shoes, where it took everything in me not to fall to the floor and start screaming like a madman. By the time I hit the gas chambers, I never wanted to stop screaming.

Belinda Carlisle’s “Avec Le Temps”
This song feels like when you’re by yourself and you sink to the floor heaving with sobs, but you feel strangely cleansed afterward. Music is often a really personal experience for me. I don’t really go to shows, but I did see Dolly Parton at the Greek Theatre a few years ago. Dolly’s music resonates with me because it’s all about being underestimated and misinterpreted, which is common in my life. Lots of people vomit up so much information about themselves, and I find that to be so repellent. Since I don’t really talk about myself, people make up stories about me. I am strong—this is true—but I hate when people say, “She’s definitely not the girl next door.” I’ve lived next door to somebody my entire life.

Pat Benatar’s “We Belong”
This song is so beautiful. I always say that I believe I’m a gay man in a woman’s body, which my boyfriend [financier Rob Adams] doesn’t like. I’ve known this to be true for a long time, but I only realized I was even gayer than all of my gay friends when I made one of them go to a Zac Efron movie. He was like, “Seriously? You’re dragging me to see a Zac Efron movie and you’re playing the Flashdance soundtrack?”

Kay Starr’s “Wheel of Fortune”
This one reminds me that life is like one big pair of crossed fingers. That’s sad to think, isn’t it? I hide sadness well. Put on some bright lipstick and nobody will ever know. That’s how I live my life, darling. I’m not even sure what I’m wistful for—I’ve just always felt a bit out of time. It’s a fish-out-of-water feeling, like I’ve gotten lost in some stitch in time and deposited in the wrong place. My mannerisms, my everything, just feel… wrong.

Lady Gaga’s “Telephone (Crookers Vocal Remix),” Featuring Beyoncé
I wanted to end this list with something highbrow. I do fight training five to six days a week, for about two hours each day. I tend to do a lot of martial arts in movies—for whatever reason I’m either trying to save the world or kill the world, so I figure I’d might as well be good at it.

Rose: Never hold your clutch under your arm. It makes your arm look fat—it needs to have a wristlet. This one is cute. but I think it’s too small.

Brian: No, it will fit a Blackberry. Let’s see…

Rose: Nope, doesn’t. Let’s try another bag. My friend from New York says this is the best part of my job.

Brian: Speaking of Blackberries, do you have a charger? Mine is dead.

Rose: No, but I can call down for one at the front desk. (calls down to front desk) “Hello, do you have a charger for a Blackberry? What shape, skinny or fat?

Brian: It’s more of a rhombus.

Rose: A rhomboid?

Brian: Actually, my rhomboids are always really sore.

Rose: Do you sleep with your arms up? You need to train yourself. I had the same problem.

Brian: That’s hysterical! Well, you are in great shape and your skin is flawless in person. Speaking of which, tell us about your new skincare line.

Rose: Well, I was asked to do many skincare campaigns that would require that I sign a non-compete clause, so I decided to do it myself with my aunt. She’s gorgeous! People don’t realize the tremendous amount of work that goes into it.

Brian: You have such fair skin. Is it super-sensitive to the sun?

Rose: It’s super-sensitive to life. I was in Afghanistan and got a terrible sunburn for the first time since I was 14.

Claude: What were you doing in Afghanistan?

Rose: I was performing for the troops as part of the USO.

Claude: That’s amazing. What a great tradition of leading ladies that have done that. I am sure the boys overseas loved you!

Brian: So what are you skin care secrets?

Rose: Pretty basic. Wash your face and don’t rub, pull or touch your skin. I am allergic to all water other than water from Los Angeles. I can get perfectly clean water from a mountain well and my skin will freak out. I actually don’t like doing my hair. I have it done every three days, which is why I am super excited about my new project—I am actually a partner of a new salon called Dry Bar. It’s a fantastic concept and we are opening in Los Angeles, Scottsdale, Dallas and next month in New York. It costs $40 for a blow out, and it’s the closest I can become to a guy who doesn’t have to worry.

Claude: People always compare you to the great stars of the silver screen. Do you draw inspiration from them when you’re preparing for a role?

Rose: Absolutely. There was a movie I did called Jawbreaker. My inspiration came from a character that Gene Tierney plays in Leave Her to Heaven. In the film, she’s at her height of beauty. She plays a sociopath who gets rid of everybody in her boyfriend’s life. She eventually pushes his child on a wheelchair off a mountain. When her lover asks her why she did it, she says, completely deadpan, “But darling, I thought we needed more time together. When actors often play evil characters, they don’t really commit to the challenge, because they want audiences to like them.

Brian: We love your show on TCM.

Rose: Do I feel like I was born in the wrong era? Maybe I should have had my heyday in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s? Yes. With that said, I am not about to go around like a period silver screen actress. I went on TCM at first as a guest programmer. You pick out 10 films and they narrow it down to four. The Night of the Hunter was my first. The other one I love was A Place in the Sun. That’s the first film that made Elizabeth Taylor fall in love with acting. I thought it was my destiny to meet her, but I guess it wasn’t.

Claude: Do you prefer to play a sociopath or a sweetheart?

Rose: Totally sweet is dull. You need to have some pathos for something to be interesting. Whenever I play a character who is lying, the audience has to know I am lying, but it still has to be real enough so the other character doesn’t know I am lying. The thing is, in a film as opposed to theatre, the camera is tight and close on your face. A tiny eye movement can be very evocative even though it is small. I try not to think about the process too much. The life unexamined. I am not a method actor—I think it sounds ridiculous when actors talk about their process. I don’t even like to call myself an actor. In fact, I was held up in Romania because I wrote student on my immigration entrance form.

Brian: Maybe you should just write ‘thespian!’ We loved you in Charmed. It was an amazing post-modern experiment for you, completely ahead of your time in terms of the wave of film actresses doing provocative and interesting TV roles. Tell us a little about it!

Rose: I was called by Aaron Spelling and offered the role in Charmed when I was in Romania doing a movie. I started laughing and hung up. “Aaron Spelling from Dynasty? He would never call me.” And then, he called back and I realized it was him. I had never been offered to do a TV show before. I thought how funny it would be to do something so popular. At that point, the show was already a big hit. I thought I would be in my own art project. Well, 4 episodes turned into 5 years, and my art project turned into golden handcuffs. I was barely with my dogs, family, friends… And during time off, I thought I’d be doing a movie, but I was too exhausted.

Brian: So who are some of your favorite actresses?

Rose: Barbara Stanwyck is my all-time favorite. She was a workaholic. Sometimes I wish we were still in the studio system, because it was all about faces! Speaking of which, one of my other favorites is Bette Davis. Which reminds me of a great story. When Johnny Carson asked Ms. Davis during an interview if she had any advice for young actresses coming to Hollywood, she said, “take Fountain,” the street in L.A. that has the least traffic.

Claude: You’re known for your incredible fashion sense and sophisticated finishing. Is it a lot of work?

Rose: It’s armor to be finished and look presentable. I see people running around in sweatpants or work out outfits and to me, that would be a vulnerable thing. Even though I’m not wearing makeup today, I put on lipstick. In New York, the paparazzi will get you when you come back from the gym in your sneakers. I think there is a positive thing about shame. It’s like when someone spits on the street, and I think, “Is there no shame?” It keeps the fabric of society together. Have some class, have some shame!

Brian: Tell us what you want to be when you grow up, and tell us about your family.

Rose: I want to be forensic pathologist. One of my sisters is an art history professor, the other is an aeronautical engineer, my brother is in medicine, and my baby brother is in Afghanistan. As you know, I grew up in a religious commune, and luckily, we were placed in Italy.

Claude: Did you learn to cook in Italy?

Rose: I bake because it is precise. People who are cooks don’t like to bake, and vice versa. I can’t deal with raw things, so baking is more pleasant.

Brian: We read that you would also like to curate. Who is your favorite artist?

Rose: Edward Hopper. He totally understands solitude and loneliness. One of my friends worked on the Hopper exhibit at the Whitney, and one of the most amazing things I got to do is be alone with it the night before it opened. I remember being at a 7-Eleven once at a very low point for me and at that exact moment, the clerk looked at me and said, “You must feel like the luckiest person in the world!” Hopper’s work is so great at displaying the disparity between outside and inside, like that very moment. I have a lot of blue periods, so I relate to his work.

Claude: So what about Betty Boop?

Rose: It’s a faux trailer for a biopic that doesn’t exist. It was so much fun! I rarely will say that I love my work, but I am really proud of it! My dad used to watch Betty Boop, and it was great to work with Billy Zane.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you remember reading the script for the first time?
ROSE MCGOWAN: I thought it was a fantastic script when I got it. I was so green — I didn’t really have a good reference point for a whole lot other than that I like a good story and it was certainly a good yarn. I really liked the character a lot. The inside scoop is that I auditioned for it and then they made me an offer, and then they got so pissed off with what my lawyer, who was way too aggressive, countered with. They pulled their offer and made me come back in and re-test twice and didn’t give me a cent over what their original offer was for because they were so pissed off at my lawyer.

Do you still have that same lawyer?
No. No. And at this point, they’d they’d just cast Neve — as film rules go, you can’t have two people that have dark hair. So I’m sitting in a meeting with Cathy Conrad, the producer, who’s blond, and I just found out that they cast a brunette, and I said, “Cathy, I really want to make my hair blond. Who’s your colorist?” And it was like a light blub went on over their head. I was shuttled off to Cathy’s colorist, and I got a nice shade of Middle American blond. I hated that color. It was perfect for the role.

You do look better with dark hair.
It was like every plumber wanted to date me with that hair color. I immediately went down in the social strata of dating. From a sociological perspective, it was actually fascinating. Any guy that I liked wouldn’t give me the time of day. Anybody who had a jacked-up pickup truck was all over me. It was hilarious.

How was the actual filming?
I look back on it, and now I think it’s probably the best set I’ve ever been on. It was so calm. It was very, very fun, but it was very, very calm. [Director] Wes [Craven] has this lovely professorial tone. He’s just [got] such a lovely, great energy.

Did the cast hang out a lot?
Yeah, absolutely. It was funny, one night I remember David Arquette and I were bored, and we weren’t working. We found out it was prom night in the town so we started chasing all these limos, following all these prom cars, trying to figure out where to go. [Laughs] Crashing people’s prom parties because we were so bored. I’m sure it was my idea. “Hey, this is what we can do. I can’t find a gay club, let me try this.”

Did you notice Courteney and David getting closer?
No, I actually thought that, “Oh gosh, she’ll never give him the time of day.” I was wrong.

It must be surreal to shoot a death scene in a movie. What was that experience like?
The thing that was stranger — more so than the filming — was when you have to do a cast for your head for the dummy. And the eyes were so distressingly real. I’m not creeped out by a whole lot, but that really freaks me out because it really looked like me in the throes of terror and death, and they did such a good job.

How long did that scene take to film?
That was an all-nighter. In a real garage. It was really, really cold. I was really going up and down in a dog door, and I’ve since learned that I can fit into almost any dog door. And because I’m thin enough, I kept falling out of it. They had to nail my shirt in onto the wood otherwise I’d like, flop out. That’s how I get in my houses when I get locked out, for real. [Laughs] That’s my takeaway from Scream: I know I can fit in dog doors. You have to jimmy your body in a certain position and really hope you’re not wearing something super fancy.

Wasn’t the original title Scary Movie?
The original title was Scary Movie, and I was really mad when they changed it. The cast and some of the crew got together for a wrap dinner, and we all got bottles of wine. I think everybody drank his or hers, but I didn’t. I still have mine and it does say, “To the cast and crew of Scary Movie.” I knew some day eBay was coming.

Once the movie opened and became a hit, did you all celebrate?
I had a really good time at the premiere, and it was my first premiere, really. There was a great picture of Wes and I in the L.A. Times. I guess the after-party had hired some fortune teller and the L.A. Times interviewed her and she said something like, “I think it’s going to go poof at the box office.” I remember being depressed by that. I remember at each milestone being like, “Take that, fortune teller!” I’ve always been irritated at whoever that lady was.