Rose McGowan: 10 things we learned when she spoke to Louis Theroux

1. Rose says getting a puppy has helped with her PTSD

After a therapist prescribed a dog to help with trauma, Rose decided to get a puppy. She says she did it because “I love them, and it’s a good excuse”, but didn’t expect that having a dog would actually make a difference. However, she thinks it has: “my post-traumatic stress nightmares that I had for 22 years, and even before that, growing up... have gone down by about 85% since getting this dog”, she says.

2. She grew up on a duke’s estate in Italy, as part of a cult

Rose was born into a group called The Children of God and lived in a commune in a Tuscan palazzo until she was 10. She says it took years before she realised that her time in the cult was still affecting her thinking as an adult. “If something would appear in front of me, I’d be like, ‘Oh this must be what God wants me to do’”, she says. “And I really thought I’d escaped the programming. That one took years to notice.”

3. Aged 13, Rose criss-crossed the USA with two drag queens and a stripper

Rose describes running away after her parents found out she had taken acid and put her in a hospital, recalling: “I just thought, this is hell.” On the streets, she “immediately fell in with two drag queens and a stripper named Tina”, who joined her on bus trips around the USA. Rose would get free travel by telling the police in each place that she was lost and needed a ticket home. In the end, she says, “I got exhausted and sick, and I called my aunt in Seattle and she took me in.”

4. She found being famous as an actor “deeply embarrassing”

Rose McGowan says she was never comfortable with her fame

Rose became well known after starring in the films Scream and The Doom Generation in the mid-90s, but she was never comfortable with the fame that acting brought. “I found being reacted to for something that wasn’t me deeply embarrassing,” she says. “It didn’t give me a rush. It was the opposite for me, and I looked at it like, this is my day job, it’s just extraordinarily strange.”

5. Being portrayed as a sex symbol left Rose feeling isolated

When Rose was starting out as an actor there was no social media and she had no way to communicate with the public. She says she was simply seen as a sex symbol because that’s how she had been sold to people. This meant she was ostracized within the Hollywood community “because most women think you’re trying to steal their husband, and most men think they have a right to touch you. And it sets you up for a really crap existence. And so… I hid.”

6. Rose was shocked when Harvey Weinstein got convicted

Rose was one of the first women to go public with allegations of rape and sexual assault against the film producer Harvey Weinstein. Her fearless campaigning helped give momentum to the #MeToo moment, which led to many more women coming forward. Weinstein denied all allegations of non-consensual sex, but in the first case to go to trial he was found guilty of rape and sexual assault and jailed for 23 years, with another case yet to come to court. Because he was so powerful, Rose was “shocked that he got convicted”. Now, she says, “it’s just time, really, to start calling it what it is. This is a convicted rapist. We can use the word.”

7. She had to leave LA for London because she didn’t feel safe

Harvey Weinstein used a private intelligence firm to spy on Rose and others. While she was writing her memoir in LA, she has accused him of a “mind-boggling” level of conspiracy that included drones flying past her windows, people sitting outside in SUVs, and a million-dollar bounty being placed on her manuscript. “You kind of feel like shadow people are following you everywhere, but you don’t know who they are.” Rose says she later found out that a woman she thought was the only friend she could trust was actually a private investigator hired to get information from her. “It was chilling.”

8. Rose says Hollywood is a cult that runs on fear

Not everyone is happy that Rose helped bring Weinstein to justice. She says Hollywood is “a deep cult” that “operates on a fear-based structure”, forcing people to stay silent about abuse to protect their own careers. Rose says, “a lot of people hate me there for taking their de facto leader down. They hated him, they loved to hate him. That was their whole relationship. But he was their alpha.”

9. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next

“You know, I never even saw myself alive at this point in my life,” Rose says. “I always had a very clear vision of me up until I took down Harvey Weinstein. But this is the great unknown, and that kind of makes it both terrifying and challenging.” She has released an album, Planet 9, but after doing one live performance she’s decided against touring with it. “I really honestly thought I really took away from how I wanted people to digest and absorb the work, which is definitely without my dumb face there.”

10. Her dad used to call her The Brave One

Rose’s autobiography is entitled Brave, and it’s a quality she’s identified with since she was a child. However, she says, “The thing about being brave is that you’re terrified. Every tweet I sent, I was terrified. Every time I wrote an open letter to the media and released it as a press release so it went global, I was terrified… I might just be a hard-ass.”