McGowan spoke to Rolling Stone about her turn towards music, realizing that she hates acting and outlasting "the dickheads."

How did this song come about?
I decided about a year and a half ago I wanted to start fiddling around with music again and do some under my own name [after previously releasing several songs under other names]. Because I'm not in the music world at all, it took me a little while. I found these amazing musicians in Paris, an electro band called Punishment that just formed, and I told them I wanted a song to drive on Mulholland to at night. Something really astral and kind of galactic. And I was in Paris for the fashion shows and wrote it and sang it and here we are.

What was the songwriting process like?
The songwriting process took about an hour, and it starts with some Blade Runner dialogue, but then it goes into ... I wanted something really kind of uplifting. "Held my hands up to the stars/Gilded lilies driving cars/It's time to say it so I will/I can/I do/I vow to live." Which is pretty cool, as a message. And I figure, why not layer everything into everything? That's why the title is "RM486." It's a play on the abortion drug RU486, which I think is very timely with all the crap that's going on with Planned Parenthood and trying to defund them. Ugh. I just want to take their faces and smash them into the ground. Not Planned Parenthood — all the defunders and these proselytizers that are just ... Anyway, I'm off on a tangent.

So the song is a sociopolitical statement as well as a personal one.
Exactly. Everything I do is. Like the movie I directed — I directed a full feature in under 20 minutes called Dawn, and last year it was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and qualified for the Oscars this year, but it's all about what we do to girls, and it's a big part of my life, that platform.

Music is part of it too, but also the music's just dope.

How did you come up with the characters you play in the video?
It was just a great collaboration with the Åkerlunds' company WHOYOUARE. I was really lucky to work with Jonas Åkerlund and B. Åkerlund on this. Somehow, the costumes and pieces she put on me mirrored exactly what I had wanted to create in my mind, which was basically a commentary on the different chapters of my life, or perceived chapters if you will.

[The characters are] all favorites of mine, except for the Hollywood one where there's a mouth taped over my mouth and she's the most agitated. She's got the fuzzy green hair, and that one I find the most troubling to watch, because that equals silence. Imagine for 15 years, you go to work, and everything that comes out of your mouth is something someone wrote for you to say. It's very weird.

We did it all in one 18-hour day, which is punk. We just threw down. Sammy Mourabit is probably the most incredible makeup and prosthetics person I've ever worked with. He prepared for a week, and everybody did it for free. Just four artists, just throwing down. There was a girl who was an assistant on set, who said, "I've never seen someone physically go through what you went through." There's a thing I wear of crosses, but they were like 30 pounds of crosses; they went all the way to the ground which you can't see. The next day it was like, I had to have someone drive me home because I had so much glitter on, and glitter behind my contacts. I still find red glitter on me now and then. It is all about — I've suffered for art and movies, so why not in music.