The Hollywood A-list actress Natalie Portman has opened up in a new interview this week about how being “sexualized as a child” actress had a negative impact on her as she got older.

Portman turned 12 on the set of the 1994 movie Leon: The Professional, and she starred in the movie Beautiful Girls just two years later. In an interview with actor Dax Shepard for his podcast “Armchair Expert,” Portman explained that she was portrayed as a “Lolita figure” by the press after appearing in these films.

“The premise of Beautiful Girls is [actor] Timothy Hutton gets infected with this cute girl who’s precocious and wiser than her years and there’s something whimsical about it,” Shepard said. “There’s some pretty things, and there’s some complicated, dicey things, and now I don’t know that movie gets made. There’s so many layers to it… there were times I was like ‘I shouldn’t be so in love with this girl, but Timothy Hutton is.’”

“I was definitely aware of the fact that I was being portrayed — mainly in kind of journalism around when the movies would come out — as this Lolita figure and stuff,” Portman replied.

Portman went on to talk about the negative affect that this portrayal had on her as she got older.

“Being sexualized as a child, I think, took away from my own sexuality because it made me afraid,” Portman explained. “It made me feel like the way I can be safe is to be like, ‘I’m conservative, and I’m serious, and you should respect me, and I’m smart and don’t look at me that way.’ Whereas, like, that age — you do have your own sexuality, and you do have your own desire, and you do want to explore things, and you do want to be open, but you don’t feel safe, necessarily, when there’s, like, older men that are interested and you’re like ’No, no no no no no.”

She went on to say that she then built “fortresses” around her to “feel safe.”

“So many people I think had this impression of me that I was, like, super serious, and prude and conservative,” Portman continued. “I realize I consciously cultivated that because it was ways to make me feel safe. ‘Oh, if someone respects you they’re not going to objectify you.’ It worked out, luckily. I mean, I was safe.”

Shepard went on to point out that Portman had the opposite career trajectory of other child stars, who become typecast in wholesome roles and then try to break out in hyper-sexual ones.

“It’s totally true and it’s so weird because it’s, like, I was auditioning for all that stuff too and I never got it as a kid. I always got the dark, kind of sexy, young girl role,” Portman said, adding with a laugh that when she’d try out for a cereal commercial “and they’d be like, ‘No way.’”