The
Actor on her new podcast, surviving
Harvey Weinstein and why she left the ‘toxic’ US
Rose McGowan was born into a cult – the Children of God – and has spent most of her working life in what she considers another secretive, manipulative sect:
Hollywood. As an actor, she appeared in Scream, Grindhouse and the supernatural TV drama Charmed. In 2017, McGowan accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her in 1997, and her revelations set off the chain of the events that led to the producer being sentenced to 23 years in
prison in 2020. McGowan is 47 and lives in
Mexico City; she has a forthcoming 10-part podcast, The Brave Truth, which combines tales from her extraordinary life with idiosyncratic riffs on subjects from politics to Britney Spears.
In your podcast, you describe your life as being “stranger than fiction”. Is that a blessing or a curse?I think it’s both. At times, I wonder why I can’t be whatever normal is, and why I have this strange drive to tell the truth. And sometimes I just wish I could live a regular life, but I don’t really know what that looks like. I think that’s unattainable for me, and so I try to surround myself with beauty, with plants or flowers, to ameliorate a lot of the ugliness I’ve experienced.