My best role is being a mum
Actress back in limelight after 10yrs
MANY labels have been given to Megan Fox – from sex symbol to demonised actress. But the one she is the most happiest with is mum.
As she enjoys a return to the spotlight after Hollywood ostracised her, the 35-year-old Transformers star thinks of her family first.
Megan has three kids with former husband Brian Austin Green – Noah Shannon, eight, Bodhi Ransom, seven, and Journey River, four.
She said: “Basically, anything that doesn’t have to do with my children is less of a priority to me now.
“I was never super-ambitious but now when I consider working I need to do films in LA because I can’t travel with my babies.
“If I could shoot 10 days and be done that would be ideal for me. It hurts me so bad to leave my kids that if I had a different kind of career, I would probably just give it up and be a stay-at-home mom.”
Megan is now dating musician Machine Gun Kelly, real name Colson Baker, and is still having to deal with criticism. When they first got together in May last year there were claims she was a cougar.
She is used to being trashed and argued: “He’s 31, and I’m 35… No one would blink twice if George Clooney was dating someone four years younger. Four years?
“We would have been in high school together. That’s so ridiculous that women are treated that way.”
Before the Metoo movement helped women push back against sexual abuse and harassment Megan was a victim of a vindictive backlash that ruined her career.
Initially she became Hollywood’s “it girl” in her early 20s after starring in 2007’s Transformers as Mikaela Banes opposite Shia Labeouf, leading to FHM readers voting her Sexiest Woman in the World in 2008.
Then the backlash began and she faced misogynistic criticism, claiming she was “brought out and stoned and murdered”.
In 2009, she reprised her Mikaela character in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen but in an interview she claimed working with Michael Bay was like working under “Hitler”.
She also revealed they had worked first when she was just 15 for Bad Boys II and despite her age, he made her wear a revealing bikini and heels and dance under a waterfall.
In the subsequent Metoo age eyebrows would have been raised and Bay scrutinised but back in the noughties Megan was criticised by Hollywood. She was fired from the third instalment of Transformers and the crew published an open letter calling her “a classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly b***h”.
Her image as the difficult actress was sealed.
Her other 2009 film, Jennifer’s Body – a brilliant teen horror film about a possessed high school girl who kills her male classmates – was hypersexualised and demolished by critics eager to be on the right side of Hollywood’s elite. Fans, though, have made it into a cult classic.
Megan said: “That movie is still speaking to people, especially to young girls, a decade later. It’s still so relevant today.”
But for the 23-year-old Megan the criticism and sexism levelled at her was devastating and she turned away from the spotlight to concentrate on raising her young family.
In 2013, she and Bay made their peace working together on his reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
With her career back on track, she decided to rewatch Jonah Hex, the 2010 film which was the final nail in her big-budget reputation.
The DC Comic superhero big screen outing was a huge flop with much of the failure levelled at Megan, although Josh Brolin was the star.
Rewatching the film, Megan realised it wasn’t as bad as critics had made out and had an epiphany – realising she had to take control of her life.
Which brings us to what she’s calling her first grown-up role in Till Death.
She plays Emma who spends much of the film handcuffed to her dead husband. She said: “I have never done a grown-up relationship movie.
“I don’t know if I have ever really played a married character before, so that was new for me as well.
“Jennifer’s Body was kind of similar but that was more of a teen comedy with dark elements. I’m happy to be back in the horror genre.”
The film had been due to begin filming at the start of 2020 before everything shut down because of the Covid pandemic. When things opened up in the US in the summer, the cast and crew made it work.
Proudly, she admitted: “We got it done without one single case of Covid. Everything was all good.”
In the film as a way of getting back at his wife for having an affair, Emma’s husband handcuffs himself to her and then shoots himself.
Talk about the manifestation of a ball and chain relationship.
It also meant for most of the day Megan had to carry a grown man about.
She said: “At first
I was like, ‘This is OK. I’m going to get through it and it’s a great hamstring workout!’
“But by the end, I was totally exhausted.
I was wrecked. I thought I was used to it from always carrying kids around but I guess not!”
So has she ever thought about using extreme methods to escape a relationship?
“No,” she laughed. “And I can certainly say that this one has never crossed my mind.”
With three movies in the can including Midnight in the Switchgrass, with Bruce Willis, Megan’s career is once again spiralling upwards.
It also means she has time for fun. As well as a holiday, she said: “My boyfriend is going to be on tour so I will probably stop at a couple of his shows.
“I am hoping I find a carnival, that’s my main goal, because I haven’t been to one in so long.”
Megan is back on the rollercoaster and the only way is up.
We got it done
without one single case of
coronavirus MEGAN ON SHOOTING FILM
DURING PANDEMIC