Feature: Charmed Rose McGowan

A Rose By Any Other Name
Would Spell as Sweet

She's gorgeous, she's got dark hair, her name starts with 'P';
all the signs are that Paige Matthews is really a Halliwell.
Rose McGowan joins the Power of Three in Charmed

As the fourth season of Charmed begins, the Power of Three has dwindled by a third. Thanks to the machinations of the source of all evil, Prue Halliwell has been killed and the remaining sisters have to cope with their diminished power. They need an injection of magic...

Then, in opening episode Charmed Again, a mysterious dark-haired woman turns up at Prue's funeral as if drawn there somehow. This woman is Paige Matthews, who has a dual heritage; not only is she a Halliwell by blood but also has inherited magical powers from her father's side.

"My dad is a Whitelighter, it's like their guardian angel guy that protects them. And my witch mother had an illicit affair and hence me. And you thought Soap Operas were weird," the actress playing the new younger sister to Piper and Phoebe, Rose McGowan, tries to explain with a laugh. An actress whose features (if not her hair colour) may be familiar from movies such as The Doom Generation, Phantoms, Bio-Dome and Scream, McGowan is delighted about her transition from large to small screen.

"I'm enjoying my time on the show a lot," she confirms. "The difference between film and television, at least one-hour television, is film for me is kind of like a sprint, like a dead-on run and this has been kind of an endurance race. It's like an attitude adjustment really. My attitude got quickly adjusted by the schedule."

McGowan admits that she wasn't overly familiar with Charmed before landing a role on it, although, "I had seen it a couple times before, but I never really watched – I'm a big Animal Planet person so that's pretty much the only channel that I watch. And interestingly enough, to me anyway, when I decided to do it I was doing this movie in Romania, and on the flight home, one of the in-flight things they had was the pilot episode of Charmed. I was actually just thinking, ‘Oh, I should have had them send me something so I could see how this whole thing started' but I got it right there."

It seems time to get an idea of what Paige brings to the Halliwell household. McGowan says that, "What I like about Paige the best is that she is incredibly good hearted, and I like that she's a do-gooder without being a goody two-shoes, if you know what I mean. I think she's fairly irreverent. I try to infuse a bit of that in there as well. I think she would be the first one to roll her eyes if someone said, ‘Oh, witches. They do good...'"

by Paul Spragg

Charmed Season Four See Cx Index in issue for details
UK debut LivingTV, 20.00 Mon 4th March.
Repeat (uncut) Sat 10th, 21.00
Season Three starts on Channel 5 Sat 23rd Feb, 18.50

For the full 4-page photo-interview with Rose, get Cult Times #78.

Images © The WB, Spelling Television
Feature © Visual Imagination 2002. Not for reproduction

Taken from

Cult Times ^#78
March 2002
ships from Feb 19
UK £3.25 / US $5.99

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