Rose McGowan Talks Hollywood Sexism After Her "Tweetgate" Last Month
Rose McGowan in June (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Rose McGowan didn’t think she was dropping a bombshell when she tweeted out a sexist casting notice in June. The note, which came attached to an Adam Sandler script and requested that actresses “show off cleavage” and wear “form fitting leggings,” struck her as funny — but also, typical of what women face in Hollywood. Little did the actress suspect that the tweet would create a media firestorm and cause her to be dropped by her agent. In a conversation with Indiewire’s Dana Harris for the new Indiewire Influencers podcast, McGowan speaks candidly about Tinseltown’s deeply ingrained anti-woman bias.
Related: Female Film Directors Share Stories of Hollywood Sexism in Anonymous Blog
The actress and director tells Indiewire that she didn’t have an agenda when she tweeted out the casting notice. “I thought it was hilariously stupid… I mean, it was to go in for the part of a supermodel who’s obsessed with Adam Sandler and was chasing after him,” says McGowan with a laugh. However, after she she posted the tweet, McGowan says she “started thinking of how many hands that ridiculous, stupid casting notice went through, and that it was most likely a woman who probably had to type it up… But nobody flagged it as wrong, because this is commonplace here. But just because it’s commonplace doesn’t make it okay.”
Though she received supportive tweets from some women in the industry, including Jessica Chastain and producer Megan Ellison, McGowan also experienced backlash from her colleagues. Her agent dropped her with a single email, which said bluntly, “We are choosing no longer to work with you.” A few days later, McGowan fired her manager, who had previously advised her to “stop trying to change anything, because it’s not going to happen.” (“I was like, ‘Have you met me?’” jokes the actress.)
Having worked in films (Grindhouse, Scream, The Doom Generation) and TV (Charmed, Nip/Tuck) since she was a teenager, McGowan has a lifetime’s worth of stories about Hollywood sexism — but she doesn’t have to go too far back to find them. Just three years ago, she says, she met with an agent who ended the meeting by trying to shove his tongue down her throat. (“I was like, really? Still?” she says.) And now that she’s moving into directing, she’s experiencing a whole new category of discrimination.
“When I was at Sundance, all the press was, ‘We’re so surprised she had it in her!’” recalls McGowan, whose short film Dawn was nominated for the festival’s Grand Jury Prize. “But if I was, say, Ryan Gosling directing, would you be ‘so surprised’ he had it in him? Would you preface every single article with that?”
That reaction has only galvanized McGowan, who is currently working on a movie and TV series about the beginnings of the Children of God cult (a story that she is uniquely qualified to tell, since she was raised in that community). And although Hollywood is slow to change, she believes it’s a hopeful sign that women are standing up for those who speak out. “Tweetgate,” says McGowan, is “the first time I’ve ever gotten support of any variety, from anybody… [It’s] incredibly gratifying.”
