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Locked and Loaded in Planet Terror
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The end of Charmed meant that Rose McGowan was now free to return to the big screen. She had met Robert Rodriguez at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and ended up talking to him for hours about, among other things, the double standards in films. Rodriguez remembers: “We were sitting around, I was talking to Clive Owen, and then turned around and met Rose, and I was like ‘what are you up to?’ and she told me she’d been stuck on a TV show for five years, and I was like ‘Oh, no wonder I haven’t seen you around. You were a Dimension girl for a while, you were in Scream… Then, like, gone.’ I didn’t know what happened to her. And I started talking to her — she’s hilarious. She really just caught me off guard. When you meet somebody like that, that has a personality that’s so strong in person, you know that if they can blow it up 50 times on a screen, it’s going to be amazing. You get that epiphany of ‘I want you to be in my movie, but as you are.’ People tell her she should be a stand-up, she’s so accident-prone, she has the worst luck, there are just so many things about her. She’s always talking about her useless talents. I was like taking notes — ‘All I have to do is add a machine-gun leg to her, and she’d be over the top.’”
Later, Rodriguez called her and said “I’m going to put you in my movie. I am going to change things for you.” Six months later, Rose auditioned for the role of Cherry Darling in Planet Terror and she, of course, nailed it. First wounded, then equipped, and finally empowered, one night changed Cherry, just like the movie changed the career of Miss McGowan, forever. Rose also starred as Pam in the other half of Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Dimension Films wasn't sure about letting her be in both but she lobbied hard, auditioned several times and landed the role. Grindhouse opened in the US on 6th April 2007. Unfortunately its box office numbers were a disappointment but the reviews were hugely positive and praised McGowan’s performance. Veteran critic Richard Roeper commented: "In the performance of her life, McGowan throws herself into the juicy, sexy, funny, comic book hero role of Cherry Darling." Both of the Grindhouse films were later on released separately abroad and the extended cut of Death Proof premiered and competed at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
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