Jessica Raine doesn’t "get" what it means to be sexy.
The 33-year-old actress – who’s best known for playing midwife Jenny Lee in the BBC One drama ‘Call the Midwife’ and stars alongside David Walliams in the Agatha Christie-inspired ‘Partners in Crime’ – has revealed she makes a conscious decision to avoid "sexy" roles because she doesn’t understand the concept.
She explained: "Just running through all the scripts I’ve read recently, I don’t like when a character is meant to be sexy, because I don’t really know what that means.
"’She is sexy. Everybody wants to be this girl’ – what is that? You’re attractive or sexy as a by-product of something else. You can be manipulative and it’s quite sexy or you can love life and that’s what’s sexy, but sexy as a thing; I don’t really get that."
Jessica admitted she’s tired of the cliched way in which women are portrayed on television and in cinema.
She told The Times newspaper: "When I watched ‘Jurassic Park’, Laura Dern was incredible. She was in shorts and a shirt. She had her hair pulled back and she was running around in trainers, and I was like, ‘Oh God. And she was really clever; she was a scientist.
"In this one Bryce Dallas Howard is head of a corporation. She’s incredibly powerful, but with that she’s very cut-off and I think it’s a little bit of a cliche. And I think every woman in it cried. I was like, ‘These are scientists. Why is everyone crying?’"
Jessica Raine: I don’t understand on-screen sexiness
