Natalie Portman is unquestionably nice to look at, but she’s been giving a lot of really odd interviews lately and the February 2010 issue of Elle UK is no exception.  Portman, who is Jewish and was born in Jerusalem, says in the Elle interview that she doesn’t like playing Jews and that she “hates” the Holocaust genre.  From NY Daily News:

“I’ve always tried to stay away from playing Jews,” she tells the magazine. “I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre.”

But rules are made to be broken. The 28-year-old actress made an exception in 2009 and played a Hasidic bride in the film “New York, I Love You”.

“That was the first thing to come my way (“New York, I Love You”) that really intrigued me,” she says.

Portman also explains why she traditionally stays away from romantic comedies.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do comedy,” she says. “It’s just that I would only get offered girlfriend parts in guy comedies, which aren’t exciting to me, or those offensive roles in romantic comedies where the woman has to have a job in fashion so that she can have nice clothes, and her goal is always marriage.”

But it’s not that Portman is afraid to get sexy. After all, one of her first roles was as a precocious 12-year-old in “The Professional.”

“There was a lot of controversy about the whole Lolita thing,” she says in the interview. “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.”

This seems pretty disingenuous to me.  It’s not like The Professional was Portman’s only sexed-up role by a long shot.  She’s was the Lolita-esque ingenue in Beautiful Girls, she was essentially nothing but a love interest in the Star Wars prequels, she played a stripper in Closer, she did nudity in both Hotel Chevalier and Goya’s Ghosts, and photos of her bare ass have been floating all over the internet for several years now.  Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with an actress owning her sexuality or doing nudity if it’s something she’s comfortable with, but it’s pretty jackassy to do it and then turn around and run your mouth off about how you don’t want to be seen as a sex object, so you “went in the opposite direction.”

Natalie Portman should maybe consider a new “opposite direction” for her career, consisting primarily of standing around looking pretty and keeping her mouth shut.

In the February 2010 issue of Elle UK: