Now this is one very interesting (and odd!) connection.
Emmy Rossum gets super-sexy for her Complex spread in the February/March 2014 issue, donning multiple black leather outfits that accentuate her killer curves, but what may grab your attention even more than the Shameless star's busty figure is her anecdote involving—wait for it—Adolf Hitler.
"My first nanny was an Austrian woman named Gertie," Rossum told the mag. "Hitler gave her a prize as a child for singing the best German national anthem. My mom is Jewish, so that was a little awkward, but Gertie was a great nanny. She would tell that story but she knew Hitler was a bad guy. There's no getting around that. And she was a child; she didn't know any better when she was singing the German national anthem. Clearly if she was working for a Jewish family she had no prejudice herself."
Say whaaa?!
There were a number of nannies in Rossum's life, and she shares that they definitely affected the woman she is today. "They were all women who were in their 60s—my mom wouldn't let anyone who was of procreating age take care of me. My nannies taught me that if you wanted it bad enough, impossible things could happen, like your dad coming back," she said.
"That was something that was verbalized to me as a kid, like, 'If you light this many candles or if you pray or do this or do that….' It made me disillusioned as a teen when that didn't happen, and when I started becoming known as an actress and it still didn't happen. There were a lot of disappointments. That's something I draw on for characters and that's definitely where my distrust stems from. I feel like I'm going to read this and be like, 'Wow, I was way too open.'"
However, one aspect Rossum's never really shied away from is exuding her sexuality—at least onscreen.
"I can do it when I'm in a character. When it comes to Shameless and it's story-related it feels natural because I'm Fiona, not Emmy. There's a distinction for me. It's a different mentality approaching the scene. We always try to straddle—no pun intended—comedy and believability, finding the reality in it, what we can show about this moment and this sexual encounter that will illuminate something.
"Sex is taboo in our culture, but if you ignore it as part of the human experience and shy away from it because you're scared to show it as an actor you're limiting yourself. Of course guys that I've dated have said, 'You know that people are going to jerk off to that scene, right?' and I'm thinking, Yeah, but I did so much emotionally. Isn't that interesting, too? I guess there's a certain masturbatory nature to sexuality but at the same time there are so many interesting things to be investigated that started with Kinsey and Freud. Porn isn't what it's about."
Did you get that?