Rose McGowan Has Found ‘So Much Joy’ 5 Years After Leaving Hollywood for Mexico

Rose McGowan is enjoying a quiet and thrilling life in south of the border.

At 90s Con in Hartford, Conn., the Charmed actress appeared with costar Holly Marie Combs in a wide-ranging, fun panel, moderated by Sabrina the Teenage Witch alumna Jenna Leigh Green. Their fellow costar, Jennifer Rhodes, was unable to attend.

During the chat, McGowan opened up about leaving Los Angeles in early 2020 and finding a pace of life that better suits her in Mexico.

“My father lived in Mexico for 35 years and mi gusta Mexico. Te quiero much, mi amores. It is an incredible country. It is so wildly geographically diverse, culturally diverse and just very, very special. There’s so much joy,” she shared.

“My favorite word in Spanish is alegria, which means joy, and there’s so much of that there and color and and passion and and fun and different … just different. And you know I had to talk for a lot of years, kind of more than normal people might.”

McGowan found the throughline in the characters she played were giving spirits, and she wanted to shape her life to follow suit.

“At one point, you know, as Paige was a social worker and I was raised in a commune growing up in Italy to be kind of a volunteer, and I kind of thought, ‘Well, I can also do this in real life. Away from this,’ ” McGowan, 51, said.

“There’s a point where I just got really talked out. I just wanted to listen. I wanted silence, and I wanted to listen more than I wanted to talk,” she continued.

McGowan noted that, “There’s things about it that are difficult, just like anywhere, and it’s certainly a challenge sometimes, doing things when, at first, you don’t really know the language. You’re navigating a totally different system. You learn very quickly, though.”

The actress noted it was helpful that Italian is her first language, so she was able to get along in Spanish.

“I like adventure. I’ve kind of always been the adventurous sort. I always kind of lived in dense areas, so at one point I went to like the most remote location in this area in Mexico that I’m at. It was just me and my dog and a metal pipe for a shower,” she shared. “That was it, and I was grateful, right? And the gratitude that you feel for smaller things, because you have to fight for them and you appreciate them.”