HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Minka Kelly is just fine with turning 30, a milestone she reached in June.
"I think it’s the most exciting birthday I think I’ve ever had," the actress tells Esquire, which named her the Sexiest Woman Alive this year. "I’m so excited to be a woman. Done with the twenties. I’m confident — confident in my skin, and I’m cool with my flaws and all that stuff."
"It just feels nice to be at peace with yourself," she continues. "I think my thirtieth birthday gave me permission to have all that. The twenties were a pain in the ass — figuring it all out. What am I doing? Where do I go?"
Life hasn’t always been easy for Kelly. Her father, a musician named Rick Dufay, wasn’t around for her childhood, leaving her mother to care for the two.
"My mom lived a fast life," Kelly recalls. "It was all about what we could do to have fun with nothing. She — for most of my life, she was a dancer. An exotic dancer. She was a stripper. Um, so she would come home at like three, four o’clock in the morning, and sometimes she would have a really great night, and so she would wake me up in the middle of the night and we’d go to Ralphs and go grocery shopping. And that was so much fun. We’d have the whole grocery store to ourselves, and we would have a blast and buy a hundred dollars in groceries. And it was just the best day ever. The best day."
Kelly and her mother moved around quite a bit in those early years. At one point, they ended up in Albuquerque, N.M., where her mother’s boyfriend lived. Kelly admits she developed a reputation as a tough girl, particularly after she won an after-school fight one day.
"I’m a very nice girl, but nobody pushes me around," says Kelly, who had befriended a girl known for her kickboxing skills.
In fact, the former Friday Night Lights star says that if you mess with one of her friends, "that’s when you’ll see a whole other side of me. That’s when you’ll see the side that grew up in Albuquerque."
But that tough side isn’t what caught the eye of her current boyfriend, New York Yankees star Derek Jeter. Kelly says the pair always makes it a point to treat everyone with respect.
"It blows my mind that anyone could be unkind to anyone," she says after the interviewer compliments her for being courteous to the restaurant staff during dinner. "The guy clearing our plates is a person. I don’t care if you’re sweeping the floor. I don’t care if you’re cleaning my toilet."
She adds, "Not that I have someone to clean my toilet — I clean my own toilet."
Also see: Minka Kelly Photos
