AUSTRALIAN actress Isabel Lucas shaved her hair, covered herself in tattoos and sported a gold tooth for her film latest role — because she did not want to be seen as “attractive”.

The former Home and Away star plays a “wild, rebellious” prison escapee in Shane Abbess’s dystopian sci-fi thriller Origin Wars. Lucas, 32, said she is always keen to steer clear of the “conventions of beauty” and worked with the make-up and wardrobe department to make her character Gyp look “strong and volatile” and less “girly”. “I got to really work on every single tattoo — every part of it they were super-obliging and amazing to work with, ” she told the Standard. “All the tattoos and the shaved hair and the gold tooth, they were like, ‘Go for it, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to look like.’ I didn’t want her to be attractive, I wanted her to feel volatile and wild and strong and like she was able to protect herself.”

Lucas, who was in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Red Dawn and Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, cut her trademark long blonde hair into a pixie crop back in 2013. “There have been moments in my career where I’ve chosen to cut all my hair off really short, like a boy cut, and that was consciously a choice, ” she said. “I guess it was an attachment to what society, including myself, might attach to the idea of what is attractive or how a woman should look.” She said she was constantly “testing” the idea of what beauty is.

Lucas once dated Home and Away co-star Chris Hemsworth and more recently singer Angus Stone but does not like to make details about her relationships public. “I’m not consciously trying to be distant but it’s important to navigate [public life] so it feels like you still have your own space and privacy too, ” she said. “Relationships… I just don’t share that. There are boundaries where I make a nice clear line for myself.” She moved back to Byron Bay in Australia last year after seven years in LA but is packing her bags again to work on an undisclosed project in the US. “I’m about to get onto a plane in a few days and don’t even have a ticket, ” she said.