It's nerves over nakedness, as far as
Jessica Alba is concerned.
The 25-year-old actress tells Elle magazine in its November issue that when she was playing a stripper in 2005's Sin City, directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez offered her the option to bare all – but she said no way.
"I don't do nudity. I just don't," says Alba, who is currently shooting the movie farce Good Luck Chuck with Dane Cook. "Maybe that makes me a bad actress. Maybe I won't get hired in some things. But I have too much anxiety."
Of the 2005 flare-up in which Playboy magazine published a photo of a bikini-clad Alba on its March cover – suggesting, she claimed, that readers would get a glimpse of all of her inside – Alba now says, "It was against who I am and what I represent. I've been working so hard to be somebody else, and it just wasn't cool."
(The face-off between Alba and Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner ended with his apologizing to her and making an undisclosed donations to two charities Alba supports, Keep A Child Alive and Until There's A Cure, her rep, Brad Cafarelli, told PEOPLE at the time.)
Alba also tells Elle that despite being a longtime Los Angeles resident, she'd like to move to New York to pursue an independent-film career – and spend more time with boyfriend Cash Warren, a former production crew member on Alba's Fantastic Four who is now producing on his own.
But, says Alba, maintaining a personal life in Hollywood is tough. "Just being an actress period, and being in a relationship – I don't recommend it," she says.