I’ve never really gotten the appeal of Minka Kelly. I’m being serious – there are some women that I see photos of, and I can totally understand why straight men are totally into them. Megan Fox is like that – even though she annoys the hell out of me, and I know she’s dumb as a rock, I “get” why men like her. Minka is not one of those girls, to me at least. Sure, she’s pretty and she has a very wholesome, accessible cuteness about her. She’s the kind of girl guys want to date because she seems nice, and like she won’t laugh at you if you approach her. But she seriously looks like thousands of other girls-next-door, in my opinion. She also looks a lot like Leighton Meester. Whatever – just yet another example of how I don’t know anything about men. Minka has been named Esquire’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” for 2010. Previous “winners” have included Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Charlize Theron, amongst others. Here’s Esquire’s “behind-the scenes video” of the photo shoot (which is like soft-core porn) and some highlights from the interview (full Esquire piece here):

On her mom, the exotic dancer: “My mom lived a fast life,” she says now. “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.”

On being tough: “I’m a very nice girl, but nobody pushes me around,” she would write me later in an e-mail. She was talking about a fight she got into at school once. She had befriended a girl who knew how to kickbox — who, in fact, “came from a family of kickboxers” — and Minka eventually ended up kicking another girl’s ass in one of those big fights after school where everybody shows up. Even today, when you mess with her or one of her friends, she wrote, “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.”

Minka on her twenties (she‘s 30 years old now): “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. 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?”

[From Esquire]

Eh. She sounds like a nice, pleasant girl. I didn’t know she was thirty – I thought she was early or mid-twenties. I also didn’t know that she supported herself by being a nurse for four years. That’s really great! So, in the end, she’s kind of hard to dislike. She’s pretty, she’s accessible, she’s nice, and she supported herself by doing a thankless job for years. So… well done, Minka.

Photos courtesy of Esquire.