No O.C. no problem for Rowan

[Emma]

The O.C. star Kelly Rowan lets out a big laugh when it's suggested she doesn't let any perfectly manicured southern California grass grow under her feet.

The Fox show might be ending Feb. 22, but Rowan has a television movie airing Tuesday and an independent film opening next Friday.

"Well, you know, there's lots of time to sleep later," she jokes over the phone from Toronto.

The actress, who spent the first 12 years of her life raised as an only child in Ottawa, may be seeing her gig on The O.C. end -- it was cancelled late last year after a four-season run -- but she isn't wanting for work. Part of that is her commitment to producing, something she says she consciously sought out as an actress in her 30s.

Sure, Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren may have cleaned up at the Golden Globe Awards on Monday, but Hollywood is Hollywood, says Rowan.

"That's kind of why I got involved in producing and developing," she says. "because I didn't want to complain."

In God's Country, which airs on CTV Tuesday at 9 p.m., was filmed outside of Toronto last summer; Rowan flew back and forth to shoot Mount Pleasant on weekends off from The O.C. last spring.

That they are opening in the same week, Rowan says, "just happened."

She's spent the past five years working with her producing partner Graham Ludlow to bring In God's Country to screen.

The movie is set in a rigid, polygamy-devoted Mormon sect. Rowan plays one of eight wives married to a church bishop (played by Desperate Housewives Richard Burgi) who flees but is forced to return when she learns her vengeful ex is bent on marrying her daughter from her first marriage.

Rowan says she thought it was an important story to bring to light, particulary considering similar groups regularly ship young teen women back and forth across the border to marry church elders.

YOUNG GIRLS TRAPPED

"These young girls, they stop getting an education in Grade 7," she says. "It's all they know, so it's very difficult for them to leave these communities. How would they survive in the real world?"

The script for Mount Pleasant, which centres on a middle-class Vancouver neighbourhood plagued with drug and prostitution problems, came to Rowan. She calls her character -- faced with a husband caught sleeping with an underage teen -- "really edgy" compared to The O.C.'s got-it-together Kirsten Cohen.

As for The O.C., Rowan seems ready to let it go.

"The beautiful thing about doing a television series is that you have a regular job," she says, "and the not-so-beautiful thing about doing a television series is you're doing the same thing every day."

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