8 Days Issue #590 

Casting The Spell

It wasn’t exactly an exorcism, but when Rose McGowan began work on Charmed last August, she inherited the dressing trailer formerly used by the show’s controversial departed star, Shannen Doherty, and she immediately began burning sage. “The trailer had a really strange vibe,” says McGowan, who, as shock rocker Marilyn Manson’s ex-fiancée, knows a thing or two about strange vibes. “I’m not even superstitious about that kind of stuff. But I figured ‘What the hell?’”

At fist glance, it’s not apparent that her incantations have worked. In an industrial section of Los Angeles, Alyssa Milano, 28, who plays free-spirited middle sister Phoebe, Holly Marie Combs, 27, who portrays the now oldest sister Piper, and McGowan, 27, who plays long-lost youngest sister Paige, have just sauntered in front of the cameras in the warehouse sized studio that is home to the show. They’re about to rehearse the day’s opening scene, but first they start trading bards, their version of “Good morning.”

“How’s the little crab apple?” McGowan asks Combs.

“Oh, just fine and dandy for a Friday,” Combs grouses. “How do you feel?”

 McGowan, who is suffering from a cold, says, “Horrible. Like I want to die.”

Milano, the cast’s Italian earth mother, offers McGowan a dose of her “wellness formula”: “It’s full of herbs, vitamins – organic everything,” she says.

Now, after eight weeks of shooting the fourth season, the on-set chemistry is down-right charmed. Despite the 12-hour workdays, these days the set is a warm, friendly place to be. “There’s no stress, nobody’s really uptight,” says Brian Krause, 32, who plays a guardian angel on the show and is Milano’s boyfriend off the set. “It’s lighter now – it’s fun.”

The merriment marks a change from last year, when tension between Doherty and Milano turned the set into a real-life haunted house. Doherty, who had served as a bridesmaid at Milano’s wedding to Remy Zero’s lead singer, Cinjun Tate, in 1999 (the marriage lasted a year), accused Milano of a less-than-professional work ethic in a magazine article. “I mean, what do we do?” Doherty was quoted as saying. “Say a few lines, sit in our trailers and get paid a fortune. That’s really rough. And yet there was a person there that bitched about her job, day in, day out.”

The show’s producers hired a mediator to work out some sort of rapprochement. But at the end of last season, Doherty, depending on who you believe, either quit or was fired. (The show’s writers killed off her character, the protective Prue.) “Shannen said some things that have been hurtful to me personally and to everyone involved with the show,” says Milano. “She came off very bitter and angry. I think people were able to see through it. It’s almost the exact same situation as when she left Beverly Hills 90210 [in 1994].” Milano, who spent her adolescence playing Tony Danza’s daughter on Who’s the Boss?, claims that “Shannen has been the only one that has ever said anything negative about me” in her 21-year career.

In Doherty’s defense, she is missed by some. Her boyfriend, Julian McMahon, plays a half demon, half-human character on the show. Combs has also stayed friendly with Doherty. “Shannen believed in me way before a lot of other people did,” says the actor, who as a teenager played Kimberly Brock on Picket Fences. “I have a bit of survivor’s remorse. Here I am [still] on the show, reaping all the benefits. That messes with my head a little. I miss her, but she seems to be doing fine.”
And McGowan’s take? “I want to keep [the conflict] separate. I don’t need that extra crap in my life anyway,” she says. “I’m all about showing up, doing the work and having a blast, because life is going to deal you some really hard blows, as we’ve all learned recently.”

On the jocular Charmed set, this newcomer has fir right in. “When I started, they ‘pantsed’ me, stole all my clothes and locked me in the trailer naked,” she says, joking. She clearly admires her co-stars. “Alyssa is spiritual and comes from a great place. When I feel like dying of exhaustion on the set, she’ll pick me back up. Holly cracks me up. She keeps you at arm’s length at first, but she’s awesome, and I have a blast with her.”

The closeness behinf the scenes is more than just sisterhood: There’s real intimacy. Besides the Milano-Krause pairing (“I’m madly in love with him,” says Milano). Combs shares a home with the show’s key grip, David Donoho, 36. “The whole thing is very family-oriented,” says Combs. As for McGowan’s love life, she recently dated actor Kip Pardue (Remember the Titans) and now goes out with Ahmet Zappa, 27, the son of the late rock star Frank Zappa, yet she still dogged by questions about her relationship with Manson. “I really loved him,” she says. “But I couldn’t marry the lifestyle.”

McGowan’s attraction to the bizarre extends to her trailer, which is a funky calamity of Chinese lamps and photos of demented-looking poodles, late-period Elvis and one of Howard Stern’s sidekicks, Beetlejuice. “The weird stuff is completely normal to me,” she says.

By late afternoon, the sisterhood is in front of the camera again for the final scene. The girls are positioned in an attic. Huddled together, they recite a quirkily absurd mystical incantation and then pretend to leap one by one through a fiery ring into the show’s “limbo land”. A take is ruined when a plane flied overhead. Another take is shot, and this time, the sisters play off one another, nailing their lines and movements perfectly. A satisfied look passes among them. “It doesn’t matter how good an actor is,” says executive producer Brad Kern. “It’s still up to the gods whether you’re going to catch lightning in a bottle. But I think we’ve done it.”