Rose McGowan claims that Charmed producers monitored her weight while she starred on the show.
“They would, like, circle around me to check my weight when I came back” at the start of each season, McGowan, 52, said on the Tuesday, January 6 episode of Paul C. Brunson’s “We Need to Talk” podcast.
She added that she thinks they were “inspecting their product.”
McGowan recalled that such behavior, back then, was treated as “completely fine.”
She played Paige Matthews for five seasons of Charmed, the WB fantasy series about San Francisco sisters who have secret supernatural powers. It was produced by Aaron Spelling and Brad Kern, among others.
Charmed ran from 1998 to 2006 and originally starred Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano as a trio of do-gooding witches. Doherty, who played Prue Halliwell, left the show after three seasons. McGowan was introduced as half-sister Paige in season four. She had previously made her mark in edgier fare, having starred in the films Scream (1996), Devil in the Flesh (1998) and Jawbreaker (1999).
During her interview with Brunson, 50, McGowan recalled the pressure to tone down her style and appear “so mainstream” amid her Charmed run.
“I knew the knives would be out,” she said, referencing the aftermath of Doherty’s departure. “That the fans would want … the person, the other character, that they loved.”
To endear herself to those viewers, McGowan “decided to base my character kind of on I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball. What if she was young and in this situation, just kind of lovable, like kind of goofy and soft? I’d pitch my voice higher and be non-threatening. Because I was ‘scary’ to people.”
Prior to Charmed, “I would dress myself if I ever had to go to an event,” McGowan said. “Or do my own makeup, things like that. And then, during that whole period when I was on that show, it all changed. All of a sudden, you had to have a stylist. You had to pay $6,000 a month to a stylist.”
McGowan said stylists would reject clothes she wanted to wear, telling her “‘That’s too editorial’ — meaning that’s too edgy and fashion.” She said they selected outfits that were more “red carpet. And then they’d put globs of makeup [on her] and giant helmet hair.”
After the show ended, McGowan and Doherty formed a friendship. In August 2024, a month after Doherty died of cancer at age 53, McGowan guest-hosted her podcast, “Let’s Be Clear.”
“If I have any regrets, I wish I could have gotten to know her sooner,” she said at the time, adding, “We were really pitted against each other. I was just told she was fired and nobody talked about her.”
McGowan refused to speak badly of Doherty when she joined Charmed in her place.
“They wanted me to start a war with her, and I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I will not start a war with her,’” she said. “And to her credit, she absolutely did not do that either.”
McGowan said the “biggest misconception about [Doherty] was that she was hard. But at the same time, it was the truth, but it’s not who she was natively. And I would say that was the biggest misconception about me as well. We both just like to laugh. Soft, underneath it all.”
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