ACTRESS BELIEVES IN 'PHANTOMS'

By Joshua Mooney; Entertainment News Wire, Rocky Mountain News, 23 Jan 1998, pp. 14D.

Lying in bed in Beverly Hills' Four Seasons Hotel, Rose McGowan grabs a reporter's tape recorder and begins to croon in a low, mournful voice, ``Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrows. ... How's that for an old black man?''
Not bad. Except for the obvious fact that McGowan is a beautiful 23-year-old white woman, a vision in a fluorescent green sweater who's also one of Hollywood's most intriguing young actresses.

It's early afternoon. Despite finally getting the coffee she's craved since morning, McGowan says, she's still too tired to do more than sit up in bed. And that's OK. Getting to this bed, where she can lean against fluffy pillows and talk about her latest film, the supernatural thriller Phantoms, has been a long, strange trip for McGowan.
Like the late River Phoenix, McGowan was raised by her parents in the Children of God, a controversial religious group. ``It's a cult,'' McGowan says matter-of-factly. Though her family left the Children more than a dozen years ago, McGowan went on to many more adventures before ending up in Hollywood and landing her first film role, in Gregg Araki's critically acclaimed 1995 independent The Doom Generation.
Funny thing was, McGowan had not even considered a career as an actor. ``I've had a really strange life and will probably continue to go on having such a life,'' she says. ``Hollywood is just an interesting chapter.''
We'll get back to her twisted early years in a bit. But first, how has this actress managed to impress so many critics and movie fans so quickly? In The Doom Generation, her teen-age speed freak was the kind of affectless character Araki favors, but McGowan imbued the girl with undeniable life force. In the 1996 horror hit Scream, she played an obnoxious preppy blond beauty, yet McGowan took the cliched character and stood it on its head. ``My specialty seems to be making people three-dimensional when they're two-dimensional,'' she says. ``I'd love to get a three-dimensional character and knock it out of the ballpark. Hopefully.''
Her latest, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's best-selling novel, is closer to Scream than serious drama. Still, McGowan insists that this is more than just a horror flick. ``I've been asked several times if it's horror, and I feel like, `What do you mean? It's Friday the 13th Part 5? It's Halloween 7?' As for Scream and Phantoms, those are apples and oranges. This is more of a supernatural thriller. People who are into sci-fi and The X-Files will go for this.''
In Phantoms, McGowan plays a hip Los Angeles teen-ager visiting her older sister in a small Colorado town. They discover that the town's been invaded by a deadly, almost demonic force. Together with a couple of local cops (Liev Schreiber and Ben Affleck) and a cantankerous tabloid columnist (Peter O'Toole), they set out to save the world, more or less.
The actress wasn't looking to do another scare fest but says the chance to work with the legendary O'Toole was one she couldn't pass up. ``I said `yes' as soon as Peter was cast,'' she says. ``I'd walk on glass for him. I love him. I think if he were younger and I was older ... He's a lovely, lovely person.''
With her screen career a mere two years old and O'Toole's spanning more than 40, McGowan knew there was much to learn from the lanky Irishman. ``Obviously, he was incredibly professional,'' she says. ``But what I paid attention to was how much he listened to other things and other people. He would bend down and whisper in my ear and say, `Now, my dear, look in my eyes the entire scene.' And my knees would shake and part of my brain would say, `Omigod, that's Peter O'Toole - he's Lawrence of Arabia!' ``
McGowan doesn't come across as your typical 23-year-old Hollywood actress. But then, with a life like hers, that's no surprise. She remembers quite a bit about her early years spent growing up in Italy with the Children of God. ``On one end of our property there was this huge old cannon, and I used to nap inside it,'' she says. ``A lot of weird memories like that, good and bad.''
As a young girl, McGowan learned to be resourceful and grew up fast. ``There was a lot of separation between parents and children in the Children of God,'' she says. ``In a lot of ways it was idyllic - climbing fig trees with my brother, setting barns on fire - your basic kid stuff.'' But even then, she says, she sensed that there was something wrong. ``There were a lot of things that didn't make sense to me. A lot of hypocrisy. I had a skeptical eye toward much of it. I don't really buy into forced belief systems.''
After McGowan's father, an artist based in Europe, left her mother for her nanny, McGowan and her five brothers and sisters moved to America with their mother. The family struggled to make ends meet. With her mother back in college in Oregon, it was up to Rose, the second-oldest, to raise the kids. If that wasn't stressful enough, her mother became convinced that her 14-year-old daughter was a drug addict and had her committed to a rehabilitation clinic. McGowan escaped from there and took to the streets of the Pacific Northwest for more than a year. At 15, she went to court seeking emancipation from her parents.
``I was against not being able to have a bank account without both my parents' signatures when I wasn't living with either of them,'' she remembers. At 17, she spent time with her father in Montreal, but that didn't last long either. By 19, McGowan had landed in Los Angeles.
Asked whether she's close to her parents now, McGowan says: ``They're really different people from your typical parental types. But I'm really close to my brothers and sisters. And both my parents are very ... interesting. It's not a bad relationship. It's just not a normal one.''
One day, at the age of 19, McGowan found herself outside a trendy Hollywood gym while a friend tried to get her to go inside. She refused, she says, because she didn't like the look of the place. ``Plus, I didn't have any gym clothes. ... So later my friend came out with a female friend of Gregg Araki's. She knew what trouble Gregg had been having casting the female lead in The Doom Generation. He'd seen everyone in Hollywood under 30, and he was very picky.''
When Araki's friend suggested that McGowan, who had not acted professionally before, go up for the part, she said ``no.''
``My idea of actors was pretty much Kirk Cameron from TV's Growing Pains,'' she says. ``Not that there's anything wrong with him, but that's not what I saw in my future.''
But after McGowan read Araki's disturbing sex-, drugs- and violence-laced script, she changed her mind. ``The character was so much like me when I was 15, 16, down to the way I looked,'' she says. ``She was fists up to the world, don't let anyone know that you don't know anything, yadda-yadda.'' In short, a perfect match. She became intrigued with the character. ``It was like traveling back in time to relive your past,'' she says. She gave it a shot, landed the role and went on to win rave reviews, a cult following and additional movie offers.
It's all so unexpected, McGowan says. In the past year, she's appeared in Araki's latest film, Nowhere, and the comedy Going All the Way. ``I don't know what it's like to be from Missouri and say, `I'm gonna go out to Hollywood and make it!' '' McGowan says. ``But I know what I'm good at, and I know I haven't had the chance yet to express what's there. But I work really hard, and I keep flying by the seat of my pants. Which means I'll fall on my face someday.''