Grindhouse's McGowan Got Leg Up
Rose McGowan, who plays a one-legged go-go dancer in the upcoming genre homage movie Grindhouse, told SCI FI Wire that she performed in the film with one leg wearing a stiletto heel and the other in a knee-immobilizing cast tipped by a ball bearing, which would be replaced in post-production with a table leg or machine gun. "I was wearing a really heavy gray cast with LED lights, and it wasn't the most high-tech thing," McGowan said in an interview in Beverly Hills, California, over the weekend.
Grindhouse mimics a 1970s double feature, comprising Quentin Tarantino's car-chase thriller Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez's SF zombie movie Planet Terror, in which McGowan's character loses her leg, then gets it replaced with a machine gun/grenade launcher.
To accomodate the visual effects, McGowan had to perform in the ungainly apparatus. "It was quite uncomfortable," she said. "There was a little ball bearing on the heel, because if you were resting on the end of a machine-gun leg or a hospital-table leg, it would be very small and round and kind of tippy. And so my toes pointed in the air, my heel was on the ground, and my other side had a 4-inch high-heel boot."
Even so, Rodriguez expected McGowan to keep up with the rest of the cast: running up hills, jumping on trucks, rolling around on the ground. At night.
"It was cool," McGowan (TV's Charmed) said. "I'm not the complaining sort. I'm Irish. Just pull up your bootstraps, soldier on. ... But I had to go as fast as everybody else, do everything everybody else [did]. And they got to basically wear boots and tennis shoes. ... It wasn't like, 'Wait for me! I can't run up this hill with them!' And I did run up the hill. I just fell back down. But then I would go back up."
McGowan added: "At night, I would take off all the body makeup, and it would look like someone took a baseball bat to me. Very sexy." Grindhouse opens April 6.
McMahon Is A Prisoner
Julian McMahon (Fantastic Four) told SCI FI Wire that he is now completing Prisoner, a psychological horror thriller with supernatural overtones.
"Prisoner is a pretty kind of intense movie," McMahon said. "It's about a guy who's this arrogant filmmaker who gets in prisons, and it's a very psychologically orientated imprisonment. It's a little trippy, ... and I guess that throughout the movie you wonder if he was actually really in prison or if it was his own spell that he put himself under."
The film—which is not to be confused with the proposed remake of Patrick McGoohan's 1960s British TV series—is an independent feature written and directed by both David Alford and Robert Lynne. It centers on a Hollywood director (McMahon) who is scouting locations for a prison movie and ends up being imprisoned. It's unclear whether things are really happening, or whether they are taking place in the character's mind. Or something else.
"Hopefully, he comes out of it at the end as a better man, or at least having learned something," McMahon said.
Elias Koteas (Skinwalkers) plays the jailer; Dagmara Dominczyk, Kim Raver, Rocky Carroll and Tom Guiry are also in the cast for the movie, which shot in Tennessee. "It's great fun," McMahon said. "[I] was working with Elias Koteas, and we were stuck in a prison cell for five weeks or something. It was pretty intense."
McMahon will next be seen alongside Sandra Bullock in the time-travel romance Premonition, which opens March 16. He will also reprise the role of Victor Von Doom in the upcoming Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which opens June 15.
Milano Works Her Charms for ABC
Former Charmed star Alyssa Milano is back in the TV series business, taking the lead role in an ABC drama pilot about a lawyer/new mother.
Milano, who played witch Phoebe Halliwell for eight seasons on Charmed, will star in an untitled drama from former Everwood executive producer Rina Mimoun, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The show centers on a lawyer who moves with her infant son from Atlanta to her hometown of Savannah, Ga., where her eccentric family still lives. Mary Steenburgen (Joan of Arcadia) was previously cast as Milano's mother.
In addition to Charmed, Milano starred on Who's the Boss? and was a regular on Melrose Place late in that show's life. She was attached to another ABC project earlier this development season, but it didn't receive a pilot order.
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