While many Hollywood stars have gone naked for their roles, Natalie Portman told Elle UK in February 2010 that she hasn’t displayed her private parts for one reason.

She said she avoided becoming a ‘sex object’ after receiving a rush of ‘weird’ messages from men after her Lolita-like part in Leon, when she was 12.

“The good-girl image was something I consciously cultivated after Leon,” she told the magazine.

“There was a lot of controversy about the whole Lolita thing. ​My parents were super-protective about it, but I got a lot of weird letters. ​It was really upsetting. ​I didn’t want to be seen as a sex object, so I went in the opposite direction.

‘I’m definitely not a prude about sex or nudity, I just don’t want to do something that will end up as a screen grab on a porn site.’

The actress has shown skin for roles in “Closer” and the short film “Hotel Chevalier,” but she wants to be seen as an actress, not a sex symbol, in one of her upcoming films, “Black Swan,” which includes an intense sex scene with co-star Mila Kunis.

ELLE Magazine

Portman, 28, went on to say: “You look at Meryl Streep, who is so phenomenally, freakishly gorgeous, and in some ways it’s just bizarre that she was never a sex symbol. But it was always about her – and now it doesn’t matter that she’s getting older, because we just want to continue watching her be an interesting person.

“Whereas you see actresses who marketed themselves on their bodies, and they might be good, but over time they just lose it because that sort of thing doesn’t last.”

In I Love You, Portman played a Hasidic bride in New York, which was her first explicitly Jewish role.

Films on the Holocaust, on the other hand, are a genre she dislikes.

She added: ‘I’ve always tried to stay away from playing Jews,’ she says. ‘I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. That was the first thing to come my way (New York, I Love You) that really intrigued me.’

Natalie is also working on a comedy, “Your Highness,” a medieval marijuana frolic that will be released in October.

Natalie explained, “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do comedy. It’s just just that I would only get offered girlfriend parts in guy comedies where the woman has to have a job in fashion so that she can have nice clothes, and her goal is always marriage. I’m more interested in finding characters that make me laugh.”