In her most candid and revealing interview for years, she opens up. Megan Fox Speak toGlamour U.K.’s Emily Maddick about sexism, being a sex symbol, her psychological breakdown, the pressures of parenting, her feminist revival and rejection—and passionate Blood-drinking rituals with her fiancé, Machine Gun Kelly….
Megan Fox is having an instant. We all know this. Every red carpet she walks on, every Kardashian she poses with, every outfit she wears are analyzed, idolized or meme-ified. This generates headlines almost daily. Although she doesn’t have an account, she’s a TikTok icon for her style and unapologetic honesty. And then, of course, there’s her equally unapologetic, PDA-packing, internet-breaking romance and exceedingly extra engagement—complete with claims of mutual blood drinking—with rapper and actor Machine Gun Kelly.
But Fox has not always been as celebrated, appreciated, or—crucially—understood.
In the early aughts, she rose to prominence as a sex icon with a pinup, all-American look that earned her a reputation for roles that were primarily intended to appeal to men. She was treated accordingly by the media and the public. I was guilty of also underestimating Megan Fox in the past, believing the sex-symbol narrative, and not taking her seriously enough. But no longer.
Because, as I learn, Fox has always been outspoken—radically so—intelligent, boundary-breaking, and feminist. And in 2009, the same year she filmed Diablo Cody’s cult horror movie Jennifer’s Body, she spoke out in the media about being relentlessly sexualized and enduring what she called some “genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry.”
“I think that I was ahead of the #MeToo movement by almost a decade,” she says today. “I was always speaking out against some of the abusive, misogynistic, patriarchal things that were going on in Hollywood back in 2008 and 2009, way before people were ready to embrace that or tolerate it. It actually led to me being ridiculed. I think people just have had time to review that, in retrospect.”
One of her first experiences in Hollywood was a small role in Bad Boys IIIn 2003, she was just 15 years old when she was forced to dance in a bikini and a cowboy hat. She also had to wear high heels and a waterfall-viewing pair of high heels. She was only 15.
Footage from an excruciating 2009 interview with Jimmy Kimmel about it recently resurfaced and went viral—and has come to encapsulate the treatment Fox endured.
In it, Fox relays that she was too young to appear in a bar scene, so the “high-heel waterfall” scenario was the director Michael Bay’s solution, to which Kimmel laughs and says, “Perfectly wholesome.” Fox responds, “At 15, I was in tenth grade. So that’s a sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.” Kimmel replies to canned studio laughter: “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.” It makes for uncomfortable viewing now.
Source: Glamour