‘Charmed’s Rose McGowan Says Execs Would Discriminatorily “Check My Weight” Before Seasons

Rose McGowan has revealed what really went on behind closed doors when she was working on one the world’s biggest shows of its time, Charmed. Between 2001 and 2006, the actress portrayed Paige Matthews, the half-sister of magically-gifted protagonists Prue, Piper, and Phoebe Halliwell. In total, McGowan appeared in 112 episodes from Seasons 4 to 8, but while recently appearing on the We Need to Talk podcast, she alleged moments of extreme discrimination from the higher-ups at The WB.

“They would circle around me to check my weight when I came back from season to season. I think it was just really inspecting their product. There was no chill with it. It was completely fine to be that way. Now they have to kind of pay lip service to being different.

“People are like, ‘Do you think Hollywood’s changed?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. But, I mean, definitely in a lot of ways, in the sense that it’s not really a major player on the world stage anymore.'”

Such was the alleged toxicity of the Charmed environment, McGowan asked her bosses if smoking weed on set would lead to her dismissal. She told podcaster Paul Carrick Brunson that they brutally responded: “‘If you go work at a pharmacy, we’ll sue you. No matter what job you get, we’ll take your wages for the rest of your life, and then we’ll go after your family.'”

Why Rose McGowan Accepted the ‘Scream’ Job

The cast of Scream sitting by a fountain

Dimension Films

Five years prior to McGowan’s Charmed casting, she made the iconic 1996 horror Scream with director Wes Craven, which has since spawned six sequels (including this year’s Scream 7, due for release next month). In the movie, she played high-schooler Tatum Riley; Sidney Prescott’s best friend and Dewey Riley’s younger sister.

Speaking to Scream Obsessed about her gone-too-soon character, whose garage-door death is one of the franchise’s most shocking, the 52-year-old explained why she felt compelled to take on the role.

“The first thing that made me want to bring Tatum Riley to life was the entire script. It was just moments of genius on every single page and I had not seen anything like it, and honestly, since [then] really, at that level, and it was just perfect … When Tatum is like, being fully Tatum with the ‘Please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface … I wanna be in the sequel.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I can do that. Let’s go.'”

Confusingly, Scream 7 is somehow bringing back Matthew Lillard’s Stu Macher and David Arquette’s Dewey, despite both of them ending up on a slab across the movie series. While we eagerly await the resolution of that mysterious talking point, here’s the official synopsis:

“When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the quiet town where Sidney Prescott has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target. Determined to protect her family, Sidney must face the horrors of her past to put an end to the bloodshed once and for all.”