After watching Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a two-part Hulu documentary that began streaming today, you’ll never be able to see the actor’s early movies in the same light again. Directed by Lana Wilson, who also directed the 2020 Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana, Pretty Baby features Shields, now 57, reflecting on her years as a young girl who was treated as an object by producers, directors, and audiences alike.

Because she was thrust into the limelight at age 12,  when she played a child sex worker in Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby, Shields became a sex symbol before even understanding the concept. With her mother, Teri Shields, as her manager, Shields began to take on more and more roles that attempted to sell her “sexual awakening” to audiences, including the 1981 American romantic drama, Endless Love, which was filmed when Shields was just 15 years old. Shields was expected to film a sex scene with her co-star, Martin Hewitt, and Italian director Franco Zeffirelli had little sympathy for the fact that this clearly made his young lead uncomfortable.

“The physicality and the exploration of sexuality felt really dangerous to me,” an adult Shields says in the documentary. “And I didn’t trust the director to create a safe environment for me.”

Shields was right not to trust Zeffirelli, because as the actor explains—and as the director proudly boasts in archived interview footage from the Endless Love press tour—rather than making sure Shields felt safe on set, Zeffirelli resorted to physically hurting the 15-year-old Shields to get the shot he wanted.

“When I had the camera on her, she was not giving the impact that the scene required,” Zeffirelli explains in an archived interview clip featured in the documentary. “So she was there, and the camera was here, so I grabbed her toe and twisted it, and she screamed, ‘Ah!'”

Shields confirms this in her present-day interview. “Zeffirelli kept grabbing my toe and twisting it, so I had a look of, I guess, ecstasy. But it was more angst, than anything, because he was hurting me.”

One would hope that would never be tolerated on a modern set, but as a child with very little power over the situation, Shields was forced to simply endure. “I didn’t want to appear stupid, or untalented, so I just disassociated. It’s like you, in an instant, zooming out—you see a situation but are not connected to it,” she says. And after the Endless Love shoot, she added, “I was really shut down, after that. I thought of myself as just the workhorse. They paid me, I did the thing, they sold it, and everybody’s happy.”

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is now streaming on Hulu.