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As Amy Blue in The Doom Generation
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Eventually, Rose McGowan traveled to Los Angeles to visit an actor friend. She scored an appearance in the FOX series True Colors in 1990 and made her silver screen debut in 1992's Encino Man with a bit part as Nora. During this time, she was in a bad place mentally because her boyfriend had recently died. “There's a saying that God doesn't give you more than you can handle, but I continually got more and more, and when my boyfriend died, I just snapped. I'd held up for so long, but I couldn't be strong anymore.” In her own words, it all came crumbling down.
But four months later a chance encounter brought Rose McGowan The Doom Generation and the role of Amy Blue. “There's this gym on Beverly Boulevard that I call ‘Butt Row’ because you can see all these butts going up and down on the StairMasters. I refused to go in on principle because I thought it was tacky. So I was standing outside and my friend cam back out with one of Gregg Araki's best friends, and somehow I wound up getting offered the role of Amy in The Doom Generation. It was wild because physically, the way my character looked in that movie was an homage to my fifteen-year-old self.” As Rose regained her strength back from the breakdown, she used it to get through the filming of The Doom Generation, channeling her grief into acting. “It entailed working fifteen hours a day and doing sex scenes at seven in the morning before I went home. It was very hard, but what I appreciated about it was that it was boot camp for movies. It was sink or swim, and obviously I'm a survivor so I tried to swim as much as possible.”
After the intense shooting of The Doom Generation, which mainly took place during the nights, Rose McGowan went back to living with her father in Seattle. The idea of acting as a career slipped her mind so she enrolled in a beauty school and worked at her aunt’s beauty salon. “With my money that I got from The Doom Generation, I finished the last two months that I had to do in beauty school. That is how I became the licensed beauty operator.” While Rose was still working at the salon, The Doom Generation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1995 and Gregg Araki took his actors with him to promote the film. The innovative and stylish film gained praise and brought Rose’s name to everyone’s lips. A critic said of her performance: “In the lead role, debutante McGowan is highly photogenic, commanding the screen with the ease and assuredness of a pro.”
“At the Sundance Film Festival, I was this little fish among sharks. I couldn't figure out why all these lawyers were giving me their cards”, Rose said. Shortly after she decided to move to Los Angeles and pursue acting. Rose also took classes at UCLA and, as usual, read a lot. The Doom Generation opened in October and it gained Rose an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Debut Performance.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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