HOUSE HUSBANDS star Anna McGahan has opened up about why she will never go nude for a role again.
The 27-year-old actress, whose turn as 1920s prostitute Nellie Cameron in Underbelly: Razor required her to film nude scenes, revealed how she came to the decision on her blog A Forbidden Room.
“I was naive,” she wrote of her experience revealing her body on the Nine drama. “And in my naivety, I was not able to protect myself from an industry that did not consider itself responsible for me, or how my body was experienced and understood by a public audience.
“I had been told that I was brave. I had been told that the lighting was very beautiful. I had been told that it was tasteful. I had also been told that if I wanted to work as an actress, I had to be prepared to get my breasts out.”
While she had nothing but praise for the directors and mentors she worked with on the show, it all unravelled when she was forced to do an uncomfortable publicity shoot and a photographer berated her to “be more sexy”.
“You’re playing a prostitute and you can’t be f***ing sexy?,” he said to her.
McGahan said the experience changed everything.
“I was gutted. No, I couldn’t. I was standing there half naked, and I wasn’t sexy, and I didn’t know how to be. I knew I could play my character, but Anna – twenty-two year old Anna – with her fears and her insecurities, was not able to do it. I had one job. And I knew I had failed.
“Over the previous six months post-Underbelly I’d had countless conversations about my breasts with complete strangers. There were newspaper articles about my weight, and quotes of me saying liberal things about nudity and sexuality. The constant question was ‘How much are you like your character?’”
After accepting a role in Spartacus which would require full frontal nudity and sex scenes, before producers retracted the role, McGahan decided enough was enough and she no longer wanted to play the “sex girl”.
“Since then, I have made the decision to not do nudity. I have just said no.
“I admire any actor who commits their body to their craft – and I do not regret doing it myself – but this industry has evolved to understand intimacy and boundaries in increasingly subjective ways.
“As a female actor, I have continually had to assert the forgotten truth that my body is mine.”
Real the full piece on McGahan’s blog.
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