By Amy Croffey for Daily Mail Australia
‘I had been told that if I wanted to work as an actress, I had to be prepared to get my breasts out,’ she writes.
‘I was naive. 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,’ she says.
Although today she doesn’t ‘feel like a victim’ and says that she ‘performed the role with joy and pride’, getting undressed on camera is something she does not plan to do again.
She’s best known for playing Sydney’s most popular and most expensive 16-year-old prostitute, Nellie Cameron, in the hit TV series, Underbelly: Razor in 2011.
But 27-year-old Anna McGahan has revealed on her blog A Forbidden Room that she regrets getting naked in so many scenes.
‘I had been told that if I wanted to work as an actress, I had to be prepared to get my breasts out,’ she writes.
‘I was naive. 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,’ she says.
Although today she doesn’t ‘feel like a victim’ and says that she ‘performed the role with joy and pride’, getting undressed on camera is something she does not plan to do again.
‘I have made the decision to not do nudity. I have just said no,’ the Brisbane-born star says.
Her decision to stay fully clothed all stemmed from a photo-shoot she did with an angry photographer, who became infuriated with her when he thought she couldn’t be ‘sexy’.
She was topless but was covering her breasts and was facing away from the camera but the more he shouted at her, the more ‘nervous’ she became and she ‘froze’, Anna remembers.
‘Can you just open yourself? Be sexier!’ he started out.
‘You’re playing a prostitute and you can’t be f***ing sexy?’ he added.
‘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 with her fears and her insecurities, was not able to do it,’ Anna explained.
She also said her nude scenes led to her being typecast, and her casting briefs changed from awkward, tomboyish comedy roles, the intelligent best friend, or the assertive, passionate young woman, to the ‘sex girl’.
Shortly after her role on Underbelly, she said she was cast as a nameless slave girl in the US television series Spartacus.’They asked for full frontal nudity, and sex scenes,’ she said.
‘I felt very strange. Over the previous six months post-Underbelly I’d had countless conversations about my breasts with complete strangers.’
But producers called her shortly before she was set to start shooting in New Zealand to say she had been recast, while at the same time her agents turned down the role because of the nudity.
‘My body was mine, and worth more than their money,’ Anna writes.
Now she refuses any naked scenes, while she usually gets asked, why because shes done it all before.
‘Usually, I’ve still been cast,’ Anna beams.