"Nothing directly led me to being famous, other than the fact that I knew I was going to be," McGowan said when asked how she ended up moving to Los Angeles and acting. Asking McGowan about causal or sequential biographical developments is more likely to result in artful answers rather than direct ones. At one point when I lost the thread of our conversation and said things were going in unexpected directions, McGowan exclaimed, "Therapy, baby!" and threw her head back to laugh.



In summary: Her post-cult childhood was set mostly in the Pacific Northwest, living with her mother, then on the streets as a runaway, then with her father. She went to beauty school, thinking she would pay for college by getting a job in a salon. "And then I got famous," she said. "So that put the kibosh on hairdressing."

She'd had a tiny part in Pauly Shore's 1992 Encino Man — "They didn't pay me, they didn't get me into the Screen Actors Guild, they just lied," she said of the experience — but it was the provocateur Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation in 1995 that was her first leading role. McGowan played the profane, speedy, hypersexual Amy Blue, and while Araki's visual style used her heavily lidded eyes and full pout to their vampiest effects, she also managed to bring out strength and even sweetness in the character. She had no formal acting training, but McGowan knew how to turn things in her favor. "The script for it was kind of written like these two guys have their thumb over her," she said, "and I was like, oh no, that's not going to happen."

"I love Doom Generation,” McGowan continued, “because that character is based on me when I was 15, minus the sex stuff. Just that iron eggshell: If you push her too hard, she'd crack."

Yet the experience comes with asterisks. During her audition, with an actor she wouldn't name, McGowan said, "They laid me on top of him on a couch and he had a hard-on. I just had out of body experiences."

And as she shot the film, another actor McGowan wouldn't name fed her lines off camera as he simultaneously, she said, "was squeezing a water bottle into my crotch, and telling the director, 'Oh, I think it'll help her act better.'" Though she had no working knowledge of film sets, she tried to stand up for herself: "I went to punch the person that had been trying to take the water bottle and shove it up me while squeezing water on me, and the director said, 'Oh, children.'"

It all served to inform McGowan's current lay-it-all-bare, truth-telling direction. "From the very earliest, I realized I had no protectors," she said.

Araki refutes McGowan's versions of events. In an email to BuzzFeed News, he wrote: "I believe Rose is referring to the last scene shot on the last day of the film when I was crammed in the backseat of the picture car with the DP and soundman. Rose and her two co-stars were in the front seat doing a scene which involved them laughing and joking around and one of them spilled water on her lap — an action I did not see or condone. What I did see was Rose and this other actor screaming at each other — they had been fighting and bickering for the entire four week shoot. That was the day I quit The Doom Generation. I literally said stop the car, got out and said that's a wrap, this movie is finished." (Here is Araki's letter in full.)



In the other notable roles of her early acting career, McGowan played Tatum, the doomed best friend of Neve Campbell's character in 1996's Scream, and Courtney, a gleefully snarling sociopath in 1999's Jawbreaker. She worked steadily, but her dark intensity excluded her from girlfriend-on-the-side characters — the majority of roles for young women — and she was often cast instead in genre fare, as an archetypal bad girl, or both. Her engagement to Marilyn Manson in the late ’90s added to her Goth glam mystique, and certainly got her attention for red carpet antics, but perhaps her career suffered as a result. In October 2001, she joined the cast of Charmed, becoming an unlikely star of The WB.