Brave

by Rose McGowan

  As confused as I was, the role of Cherry Darling was shaping up to be amazing. One day early on he called me and said, “Machine gun leg. That’s it. She’s got a machine gun leg,” and I was like, “Cool, right on!” I did love his imagination. The role was written for me, with a lot of the things I actually said and did and a lot of passages that are direct quotes from me. I think it’s probably his most realized female character, one not just there as a sexy caricature. Even so, on the page Cherry was more sex fantasy than human being: I mean, she was a go-go dancer. But I fought for Cherry. Cherry, in fact, saves the world.

  Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse was Death Proof, about kick-ass cars and women dying horribly.

  What’s done to the women in Death Proof is disturbing. Hollywood is very comfortable with sanctioning the abuse of women and calling it art. I don’t think most people understand that when audiences eat this shit up, it’s programming them by desensitizing them. They learn to only really see women in an objectified sense. The poison carries through the audience. The audience then goes home and mirrors that behavior. And I’m telling you, what goes on behind the scenes bleeds through to you.

  I feel that when you see how women are treated on-screen, you see what the director really thinks about them. You see how little he values them. Tarantino’s always lauded for having strong women characters, but I would say look at what they go through. He beats the shit out of them for enjoyment. Yes, you had Zoe Bell, and Tracie Thoms, and Rosario Dawson kicking some ass, but look what’s done to the other women. Sidney Poitier’s daughter, named Sydney Poitier, played a character named Jungle Julia. Tarantino was always on her for not being street enough. It was so embarrassing. She dies by having a car split her vagina in half, her torn leg flying out the window. Another woman has her face skidded off by a tire. While shooting the death scene of my character, Pam, I got tortured in the car and had to shatter my face against the plexiglass. What the female characters in Tarantino’s films get in terms of strength, they pay for in brutality. And once again, it’s okay, it’s just women.

  I wanted Death Proof’s Pam to look very different from Cherry in Planet Terror. I wanted Pam to look like this angelic creature, because I knew she was going to get the shit kicked out of her and die in a violent and horrible way. I thought psychologically, If I can make her look angelic, I can make the audience feel something for her before she dies.

  The filming began and the nightmare began. I was shooting Charmed during the day in L A for half the week, then I’d fly to Texas to film Planet Terror at night for the other half. It was toward the end of the entire Charmed series, almost five straight years of working those twelve- to sixteen-hour days I mentioned earlier. I was ground down and exhausted. But RR was constantly talking about how he hated actors who complained on sets. So I never complained. I should have. It was a brutal schedule. I would be on the airplane going back Monday morning at six after shooting all Sunday night, every time barely making my flight. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had to rush straight to the Paramount studios and be a whole other person, this wildly different character, Paige. My brain was starting to scramble on top of its already fragile state.

  Cherry was scantily clad through the movie, so I wore a lot of spray tan; it felt like at least something was covering me up. We used an aerosol leg spray. I learned about it from some of my friends who perform drag. It stays on no matter what. I’m probably going to get some crazy-ass disease, because in the small, enclosed space of my trailer, the makeup artist and I sprayed my entire naked body every single day. We went through a can a day, and these are tall cans. We shot in severely humid Texas, so it would never dry. I left orange smear marks everywhere I went. I would get on the plane to L A with my fake tan and a packet of baby wipes, and scrub my skin. I had to turn pale again to look like Paige. It looked like I was molting.

  We shot Planet Terror at night, all night long. RR worked with more or less the same crew over and over, so they knew him very well. They stared at me since I was the outsider, and everyone knew we were together. And his wife—from whom he was now officially separated—was the producer. That just seemed cruel and unusual for everyone involved. I think that was a form of psychological torture for both of us.

  RR’s campaign of terror started the first night of filming. The character that Freddy Rodriguez (no relation) played was named El Wray (“the king” in Spanish), which is now also the name of RR’s television network, El Rey. The character El Wray was a stand-in for RR himself. There was a scene where El Wray and Cherry (Freddy and I) kiss. For a week before we shot it, RR mysteriously started growing out his facial hair. He didn’t tell me or anyone else what it was about. When it came time to shoot the scene, RR banished everyone from the set except for himself and me. You don’t usually do that when it’s just a kiss. He got a mirror out and shaved his beard into an exact replica of Freddy Rodriguez’s, focused the camera on a supertight close-up of just our lips, and made out with me on film. All this effort, so Freddy wouldn’t kiss me. Then RR shaved off his beard really quick. He was clean-shaven when he opened the set again. Of course, nobody said anything like, “This is fucking weird. What the fuck is going on?”

  The weirdness didn’t stop there. RR had cast his nieces as “the babysitter twins”—they don’t even get to have names. The camera pans up and down their bodies, ogling their breasts, sexualizing them completely. I think they were fifteen or sixteen at the time. In the scene the two young girls are lying on the couch and jiggling each other’s breasts with their respective feet. This was their uncle directing them to do this. These guys don’t care how badly they damage a girl’s self-image. They feel like it’s totally their right to do this. I was really grossed out, but I hadn’t had enough distance from the industry, and certainly not RR, to piece it all together for myself. I just knew I was very uncomfortable with it and that nobody said it was wrong, but it felt wrong.

  But the biggest mind fuck was yet to come. Knowing what had happened with the Monster, RR wrote a scene where Quentin tries to rape my character. I didn’t even know how to articulate the wrongness, so I didn’t. Maybe RR thought it would be cathartic for me? I did enjoy stabbing Quentin Tarantino in the eye with my broken wooden leg. But rape as a plot device needs to be shut down. For starters, it’s lazy writing: there are plenty of other ways of developing a female character into a badass or motivating a female character to take action. Worse: it’s exploitative. Even worse: it’s retraumatizing to the women who have been molested or raped, and it’s damaging to the actress, who has to pretend she’s being assaulted while the cinematographer is on her ass trying to make viewers think, This chick’s hot. It’s nearly impossible to not feel like the violation is real.

  Not long into the shoot, all these wild, inaccurate stories started coming out about RR and me, that we had just met on the set and we were fucking in the trailer. They ran on these gross sites like Perez Hilton and E! and papers like the New York Post. RR kept on screaming at me and accusing my friends of leaking these stories to the press. But I didn’t have any friends. He had isolated me from everyone, including my family.

  Of course in the media, it was I who wore the scarlet letter, not RR.

  The shoot was physically grueling. I’m somebody who pushes myself, but RR pushed me harder, punishingly. I needed to run faster than everybody else, even though I was wearing a four-inch high-heeled boot on one side and an eight-pound cast as a stand-in for the machine gun on my other leg. My body has never been the same.

  For one scene I had to jump over a one-and-a-half-story wall. I got lifted by thick wire cables, but I had to run as fast as I could (in my heels and cast) to reach a certain point to be able to fly. Right as I reached the top of this big gray cement wall, I had to be vertical, with my arms spread, and then I had to go horizontal, onto my stomach, perfectly parallel with the asphalt below me, and get my arms around these cables; otherwise they’d get ripped off. So I did it. I ran and hit the mark perfectly. My years of
dancing really helped with a lot of the physical things I did in my movies.

  I consider myself tougher than most. It’s kind of stupid now that I have so many injuries, but I cultivated a badge of pride over not just being an actor who complained about everything. When one of the girls I worked with would stomp on set and say, “They don’t pay me enough to do this shit,” in front of the crew, ugh, I just wanted to let the ground swallow me up, because I was so embarrassed. I thought to myself, Do you not have a concept of what the real world is like? Do you have no idea how hard it is out there? I became obsessed with working extra hard to prove that I wasn’t like the others. I should’ve worked harder to protect myself instead of proving myself to these men.

  RR got meaner and meaner, and more and more manic. He wouldn’t let me sleep more than three hours a night. When I was back in L A filming Charmed, one night I came home to my house, went into my bedroom, and screamed. There was a man in my bed and he was wearing a cowboy hat. Turns out it was a dummy. I assume RR put it there to scare me in case I came home with a man. I felt like it was just another move in what seemed to me to be a campaign of terror, the point of which was to destabilize me and have me fully under his control.

  I started that movie at 112 pounds, and I went down to 97, and he would get mad at me every day for being too skinny, but I was so stressed out I couldn’t eat; even water would come back up. You could see my ribs.

  My only salvation during this time, once again, were my two Boston terriers, Bug and Fester, my two beautifully weird-looking gargoyles, with me on the set as usual. They did more for me than any human did. Sleeping with my dogs curled up around me was something even RR couldn’t take away from me. These two beings were the only respite in the worst storm yet.

  One night RR came into my trailer in a rage at midnight when we were about to take our “lunch”—because we would go to work at four thirty in the afternoon and get home around eight in the morning. In front of me he called Jessica Alba to ask her if she would step in and complete the film for me because it didn’t look like I was going to be able to. He did it just to torture me; I didn’t even know if she was really on the phone. I sat down and cried. I’m still not sure if she was on the line at all or if he was just pretending to speak to her.

  He shocked me when he told me that what he did for a living was harder than what my brother did. My brother was fighting in Afghanistan at the time.

  This was someone who got mad when his set lunch, his chicken breast, wasn’t cooked just right. He was babied within an inch of his life. This was when I realized I hated RR. It had taken me this long and now I realized it was too late. I was trapped. Once again, the exhaustion made it hard to think straight. I couldn’t see a way out.

  One night, after he was finished raging at everybody on set and stomping away, with dark menacing eyes, he came into my trailer. He’d already fired me three times earlier that evening on the set, saying, “Don’t bother to come back,” and I was so freaked out, because if I got fired off this movie, I would never work again, ever. I knew the whole industry was watching, salivating, like a bunch of circling hyenas.

  This time he declared he was going to fire me because I was secretly in love with Quentin, wanted to sleep with Quentin. That was as far from reality as it got. RR stormed out of my trailer, saying he’d be back with a lie detector machine to see if I really did love Quentin. Oh my God, as if.

  I hyperventilated, as a full-on panic attack gripped me. I couldn’t breathe. I called my then manager, a bigwig in the management game. It was midnight when I called, hysterically crying. I told him everything that had been going on, and I told him RR was coming back with a lie detector test and was going to hook me up to it. What I hoped my manager would have done was get me out of there immediately. But he either couldn’t or wouldn’t help me, and I was stuck. We got off the phone and I curled up into a ball and sobbed, trying to catch my breath. Once again, I was on my own and I was terrified. I knew that stress made people fail lie detectors, I’d seen that on TV. My heart rate was through the roof. An unsafe man was coming back at any minute to hook me up to a machine and verbally assault me. I furtively asked several people on the crew if they had a Valium. Luckily someone did. I swallowed the pill, praying it would work in time. I went back to the trailer and waited for him to return. I willed myself to be calm, breathing deeply. I felt nauseated.

  Bang, bang, bang! My door got thrown open and there he stood holding a cruel-looking yellow machine with electrode-like wire things. I thought I was going to pass out from fear. My heart was racing so hard it hurt. He charged into the small space, his large frame filling the tiny tin box that was my trailer. I shrank back against the wall and started to cry. He told me to sit; I sat. I was pleading with him, tears running down my face. He attached the machine to me, turned it on, and started in, each question feeling like a bullet. I thought I was going to throw up, my stomach tight and clenched. I could barely breathe I was so afraid. The questions were all along the lines of, “Did you fuck Quentin?” It was laughable, but in the moment, the situation was no laughing matter. The crew probably thought we were having sex in there, but no, I was being terrorized. The lie detector said the answers were unclear. RR ripped the wire off me and stormed out of the trailer and back to the set. It was after midnight and I still had six more hours of filming to go. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went back to the makeup trailer to get fixed up and get camera ready. My poor brain was scrambled, my nerves shot, and now I had to go act like I was the toughest chick around and save the world.

  You know, if you say, “The director was a nightmare to me on the set,” people will instantly say, “Maybe he was just trying to break you down to get in character.” No, my character was the strongest woman alive. My character saves the world. This was just abuse by a man drunk on power with no one willing to stand up to him. When no one stands up to protect you, you stop expecting them to, it takes a toll. I started to feel like I was in a backward world, and I was losing my grip on sanity. My mental health was breaking down. I didn’t know where to turn or who to turn to.

  But I refused to let what was going on behind the scenes affect my work. If my child’s name was going to be stolen for this character, I was going to be fiercely protective of my Cherry. Given the psychological trauma, insanity, lack of sleep, weight loss, day after day from all sides, and being totally alone, I’m proud of what I did. I’m really proud of the complete character I created. To be physically invincible, to be emotionally vulnerable and sexy, was not easy. If they gave out Oscars for pain and suffering, I’d have been a shoo-in.

  Back on the set, there was a scene where I had to do a backbend over another actress. RR kept saying, “Higher, higher. You’re not getting your arch high enough.” To do a backbend in a four-inch high-heeled boot is already challenging, but with one of your legs set straight in a heavy weighted cast, it is pretty much impossible. I told him my arm hurt and I couldn’t. He kept pushing me. I tried so hard to please him, my body the offering. RR pushed more, “Get your back higher.” I used my last bit of strength and then SNAP. I felt my arm, like a cable in an elevator shaft, snap. Hot fire burned in my arm and brought tears to my eyes. I shoved them back down and finished the scene. I didn’t know it then, but the snapping I felt was severe nerve damage, which would ultimately lead to my being paralyzed in my dominant arm. I thought I was going to faint from the pain.

  Instead of being taken to a hospital for my arm, I was taken outside to film the next scene, that of my boyfriend dying after being murdered. Yes, RR knew about my ex-boyfriend Brett’s murder and had written a scene that would put me back into the mental space I’d been in when he died. “Art” was imitating life. Even though my boyfriend character was dying because of a pseudo-zombie attack, I still had to go through the very real emotions of my boyfriend dying in my arms.

  I was in so much physical pain, my arm was on fire, but seeing my pretend guy’s body under me, covered in (fake) blood, and to
go through the emotions of said boyfriend dying . . . it was a mind/soul fuck, let me tell you. As an actor, you trick and abuse your emotions, bringing pain up only to have to shove it back down when you hear, “CUT!” I believe acting, dramatic acting, is a form of self-abuse. Take after take of pulling up dark emotions only to seal them up when the camera stops rolling lest you make anyone on the crew uncomfortable. I cried until RR said cut for the final time. I was depleted, in pain, and exhausted. There was to be no rest because a core group of us had to go to Comic Con, the biggest comic and film convention. I had to go make a personal appearance and wow the “fans.” In other words, be “on.”

  At Comic Con, with my elbow resting on a giant ice bag, I signed hundreds of posters and sat smiling vacantly. My arm was on fire. I would take crying breaks in the bathroom, but—and this is so emblematic of my “be a good little girl” Hollywood training—when I had to cry, I stood up and made my face go horizontal so my tears dropped on the floor and not down my face. Couldn’t ruin my makeup.

  Somehow I completed the film. My arm got more and more painful. I was losing complete control of my arm. I looked like a skeleton. I was a very physical person: fight training, boxing, stunts. Now I couldn’t hold a pencil or a fork with that hand without shooting pain that is unknowable unless you’ve suffered from nerve damage—it’s like an electrical firestorm inside your own body.

  I told RR I needed to get surgery. He told me not to claim it on his company’s insurance—that I had to pay for it out of my own pocket. Over the next couple of years, I had two surgeries on my wrist, and two on my elbow, which wound up costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars, but more importantly, it cost me my ability to ever be as physical as I was. I am still damaged, and I still live with a lot of pain.