Megan Fox: How Hollywood turned on the Transformers star
After shooting to fame in Transformers and being dubbed the sexiest woman alive, Megan Fox was dumped by Hollywood. Here’s what we got wrong.
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In a year that’s become known as the era of cancelled celebrities, this week, one star has had a reputation 180 as many rush to condemn her years of mistreatment.
Transformers star Megan Fox, whose career fortunes slid after she complained about working with director Michael Bay more than a decade ago, has received an outpouring of support from fans following a resurfaced talk show interview from 2009.
But having been at the centre of harsh criticism from fans for all those years, with the benefit of hindsight, many are now wondering how she was so misunderstood in Hollywood.
Fox herself has been publicly asking the same question for a decade.
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In the clip that was unearthed this week, Fox told talk show host Jimmy Kimmel about one of her earliest experiences working for Transformers director Bay. She claimed the director ordered her to dance in a bikini under a waterfall on the set of Bad Boys II, when she was just 15 years old.
It prompted an avalanche of support for the star.
In a lengthy statement posted to her Instagram, Fox thanked fans for their messages while objecting to the “sinister shadow” that had been cast over her experiences.
She said that the incidents that have caused much outrage this week were, to her, “inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry”.
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It comes after a 2018 interview in which Fox addressed her experiences in Hollywood before the advent of the #MeToo movement, and suggested her accounts of her experiences were not always taken seriously.
Here’s how Megan Fox was unfairly dumped by Hollywood:
CAREER BEGINNINGS
Megan Fox became an overnight sensation after 2007 film Transformers.
She cemented herself as the ultimate celebrity crush of men — and women — all over the world thanks to her portrayal as bad-arse car chick, Mikaela Banes, alongside Shia LaBeouf in the hit film, which made more than $700 million at the global box office and is available to stream on Foxtel.
Despite her acting potential, Fox was immediately typecast as a sex symbol. She was dubbed FHM’s Sexiest Woman in the World in 2008, while the Los Angeles Times described her a “sex symbol of the highest order”.
Fans couldn’t get enough of her, as she reprised her role for the hugely-anticipated sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in 2009.
It all went downhill after that.
MICHAEL BAY CONTROVERSY
Fox was reportedly fired from the third Transformers film after making negative comments about big-time director, Michael Bay. She was replaced by supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
Bay claimed Steven Spielberg — the executive producer of the film — pushed for her to be sacked after she made the infamous comments, but Spielberg has challenged this claim.
Diving back into the now-infamous viral interview, it seems we clung to the wrong — admittedly problematic — titbit.
When asked by Wonderland magazine if “being a better actor matters if you’re just really hot?”, an understandably annoyed Fox gave an insight into what it was like working for Bay.
“Yeah, it does matter. Not to Michael Bay because those are literally his directions sometimes. ‘Be Hot’,” she said.
“I’ve had that note on set before. ‘Mike,’ I’ll say, ‘Who am I talking to? Where am I supposed to be looking at?’ And he responds, ‘Just be sexy.’ I get mad when people talk to me like that.”
She went on to utter the remark that led to her undoing.
“He’s like Napoleon, and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation,” a then-24-year-old Fox had said.
“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for.”
Responding to Fox’s comments, Bay painted Fox, a then-budding actress clumsily coming to grips with the Hollywood machine, as an ungrateful brat, and in the eyes of a sizeable chunk of the public, it worked.
“I wasn’t hurt because I know that’s just Megan,” Bay told GQ in 2011.
“Megan loves to get a response. And she does it in kind of the wrong way.
“I’m sorry, Megan. I’m sorry I made you work 12 hours. I’m sorry that I’m making you show up on time. Movies are not always warm and fuzzy.”
Fox’s issues with Bay began long before this drama, way back to when she was 15 years old and playing an extra on Bad Boys II — the very moment fans were reminded of this week.
Fox told Jimmy Kimmel that Bay wanted her in a bikini and six-inch heels for a club scene.
“We were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in, and I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat, and six-inch heels,” Fox said.
“And they took me to Mike and he approved it. And they said, ‘You know, Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand.’
“So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet. And that’s … At 15. I was in 10th grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”
“Perfectly wholesome,” said Kimmel, as the audience laughed.
“At 15! I was in 10th grade. That’s kind of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works,” Fox continued.
“Yeah, well that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist,” Kimmel said.
It’s taken until now for the criticism to be directed at the right target.
I hope Megan Fox is doing okay. May all her projects succeed.
— Lady V says more Hopepunk (@valkyrie_art) June 22, 2020
And may Michael Bay have chronic diarrhea and all his projects fail.
megan fox deserved better than being overly sexualised from the time she was a child by male directors and then being blacklisted when she spoke up about it while those men continued having careers
— indie (@INDIEWASHERE) June 21, 2020
i can’t believe people were convinced megan fox was the villain for a whole decade
— princess ciara stan (@cici_n_bey) June 22, 2020
her reaction is heartbreaking. this is thee megan fox having to pretend like being sexualised at 15 by a grown man was normal because the talk show host and audience find it amusing. on national tv. think about what women go through on a day to day in private https://t.co/prjNRmjHVM
— ð–†ð–—ð–ˆð–ð–Žð–Š (@arxhiiie) June 21, 2020
In an article published in 2009 by The Observer, journalist Jason Solomons detailed Fox’s audition for Transformers.
“She told me she went to director Michael Bay’s house to audition and he made her wash his Ferrari while he filmed her. She said she didn’t know what had happened to the footage.
When I put it to Bay himself, he looked suitably abashed. ‘Er, I don’t know where it is either,’” the article read.
This week, Fox claimed the car washing incident had been incorrectly reported.
“It’s important to note however that when I auditioned for Transformers I was 19 or 20. I did ‘work’ (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael’s Ferrari’s during one of the audition scenes. It was at the Platinum Dunes studio parking lot, there were several other crew members and employees present and I was at no point undressed or anything similar. So as far as this particular audition story I was not underage at the time and I was not made to ‘wash’ or work on someone’s cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script. I hope that whatever opinions are formed around these episodes will at least be seeded in the facts of the events,” she said.
MEGAN AND #METOO
Fox starred in a string of films after Transformers, including Jennifer’s Body, Jonah Hex and The Dictator, but apart from a star role in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, most tanked and did little to help her career.
In 2018, in the wake of the viral #MeToo movement which condemned the culture among Hollywood’s most powerful men and brought down movie mogul Harvey Weinstein — Fox finally addressed the “painful” time in her life when it felt like the world was against her.
The 34-year-old mother-of-three, who split from her ex-husband, 90210 actor Brian Austin Green, last month, said she was ahead of her time when she first spoke out.
“My words were taken and used against me in a way that was — at that time in my life, at that age and dealing with that level of fame — really painful,” she told The New York Times.
“I don’t want to say this about myself, but let’s say that I was ahead of my time and so people weren’t able to understand. Instead, I was rejected because of qualities that are now being praised in other women coming forward.
“And because of my experience, I feel it’s likely that I will always be just out of the collective understanding. I don’t know if there will ever be a time where I’m considered normal or relatable or likeable.
“Even with the #MeToo movement, and everyone coming out with stories – and one could assume that I probably have quite a few stories, and I do – I didn’t speak out for many reasons.
“I just didn’t think based on how I’d been received by people, and by feminists, that I would be a sympathetic victim.”
Last year, she told Entertainment Tonight she doesn’t feel as though “there is a space in feminism” for her, despite considering herself a feminist.
“I feel like feminists don’t want me to be a part of their group. What is supporting other females if there are only certain ones of us we support?” she said.
“If I have to be an academic or have to be non-threatening to you in some way? Why can’t I be a part of the group as well?”
PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN
In the same Entertainment Tonight interview, she spoke about reaching “breaking point” after the 2009 release of horror film Jennifer’s Body, a time when she found herself constantly being sexualised in films and media.
“It wasn’t just that movie, it was every day of my life, all the time, with every project I worked on and every producer I worked with,” Fox told the publication. “It preceded a breaking point for me.”
As a result, the actress’ mental health suffered a devastating blow.
“I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just nothing to do,” Fox said. “I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet, I didn’t want to be seen in public at all because of the fear, and the belief, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out.”
She added, “So I went through a very dark moment after that.”
Originally published as Megan Fox: How Hollywood turned on the Transformers star
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