HOLLYWOOD: The actress said she had deliberately shied away from "sex object" status after her Lolita-esque role in Leon, aged 12, prompted a flurry of "weird" letters from men. "The good-girl image was something I consciously cultivated after Leon," she told Elle 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." Portman, 28, added: "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." The star of Closer, Garden State and the Star Wars movies recently played a Hasidic bride in New York, I Love You - the first role that plays on her Jewish heritage. She explained: "I've always tried to stay away from playing Jews. I get, like, 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre. That was the first thing to come my way that really intrigued me." The actress is now ready to tackle a comic role. "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."