Brooke Shields isn’t afraid of causing a stir.

After her parents split when she was five months old, Shields was essentially the breadwinner in her family, growing up. Teri Shields, Shields’ mother, was an infamous “momager” who let Shields pose in Playboy at the age of ten.

At 11, she was cast as a juvenile prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby. Shields’ character is born into a brothel and is auctioned off to the highest bidder in the film.

Teri got harsh criticism for her actions.

Shields understands that times have changed.

Would Shields, who is now the mother of two girls, let her kids star in a movie like “Pretty Baby”? It is debatable.

“In 1977, probably,” the actress said in an interview with The Guardian on Monday. “Now, I don’t know if I would. It was a different era.”

“I just don’t know if you could make that movie today. I guess you’d have to have an actress who was older, playing younger. I’m not quite sure what the rules are now… But I also wasn’t personally scathed by it.”

Brooke went on to remark that because she grew up in New York, she didn’t find themes of prostitution to be upsetting because it was something she saw not far from her home.

The actress emphasized, “Not when you grow up in New York. I mean, it just takes five minutes to see – on the old 42nd Street – what prostitution was. And also I was very sequestered from all of it in my real life. I was a virgin till I was 22, so it was all pretend in my mind. I was an actress. I didn’t suffer privately about it.”

“… There’s something incredibly seductive about youth … I think it just has different forms and it’s how you survive it, and whether you choose to be victimized by it,” said Shields. “It’s not in my nature to be a victim.”

Teri, Brooke’s late mother, has been widely chastised and accused of using Brooke during her early years in show business after pushing her into the spotlight as a kid.

Shields was keen to point out that while her mother permitted her to be placed in sexual roles in films like The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, Teri could also be overprotective of her daughter. Even as a child, the former Broadway actress underlined how much she cherished her time in the spotlight.

Shields said of her mother, “She had this baby that looked this way, and that’s how we survived. My looking a certain way paid the bills. I just loved the approval. And I loved working and I loved being on a set. We had fun, we traveled everywhere. So it wasn’t as if I felt the responsibility as much as, ‘Oh my God, we get to get a car. Oh, we bought a house’. … That’s the way it went for decades. As long as I was happy, we kept doing it. I never did something I didn’t want to do.”

Shields stated that she had never experienced a “#MeToo moment” and that her mother would accompany her to Studio 54. The actress said that she grew up in New York, not Hollywood, and that she went to regular schools.

“I could just dance and have a really good time, and she would make sure I got home,” Shields recalled. “I had school the next day. She protected me, like, nobody got near me. [She] had her issues, but I felt loved by her.”