Alyssa Milano's new Maxim cover is heating up newsstands and screens everywhere. Check out the pics and a behind-the-scenes video of the photo shoot below.

Milano has played the girl-next-door since her early days as Sam on "Who's the Boss." She took a naughty turn with "Poison Ivy 2," then starred as a sultry witch on "Charmed" for years. Now she stars in "Mistresses," a new series in which her character has an affair.

"Honestly, after the first few episodes, the title is kind of irrelevant," Milano said. "In the first episode, my character cheats on her husband but the rest of the season is about her dealing with the fallout.

Now 40, happily married and a mother of one, Milano proves she's still smoking hot in the new Maxim spread.

She goes braless in an unbuttoned button-down on the cover, then poses in the kitchen in cutoffs and strips down to just a bra in the backyard.

She also takes some time to talk about her new lifestyle and how she got into peak shape for the shoot. "Now that I'm in my 40s I need to diet and, you know, and try to work out to prepare for a photo shoot like this," she admitted.

"I cut out the carbs for a couple of weeks, I was at the gym pretty much every day," Milano said.

She also opines on childhood stardom, as the perils that snagged many of her fellow young actors.

"That was an era when TV child actors just didn't work after their show was over," she says in Maxim. "I think Christina Applegate and I are the only two who maintained some sort of career path past the shows that launched us. But I have a great family, and I look at a lot of these kids who struggle in the industry and think they'd have struggled no matter what they did."