When you hear the name "Megan Fox" the first thing that probably pops into your head is,
"hot hot hot."
And you're not wrong to think that she's smoking hot.
Do you know what else she is, though?
Allegedly, the actress has been labeled a "diva" and "difficult to work with".
After bad-mouthing a director from one of her movies, Megan has hardly come across our
screens.
Hollywood turned its back on the actress, and she was left with nothing but box office
failures.
Megan described the past ten years as the darkest times of her life, but there's been
one thing that's kept her going through all of the press backlashes.
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It's one thing being seen as a beautiful and talented actress; it's another thing to be
seen as simply "beautiful".
After getting her name on the lips of people all over the world, Megan was seen as the
ultimate sex symbol.
However, it seems like Hollywood refused to see her as anything but.
Being "typecast" is an actor's nightmare; there's nothing worse than being repeatedly
cast as the same type of character over and over again.
Whether it's the geeky nerd or token best friend, once you're typecast, there's almost
no way of getting out of it.
For Fox, it was the "hot-girl-next-door" tag that she struggled to remove from her name.
Fox has discussed her frustrations with this, getting roles in movies designed to show off
her looks and sex appeal with almost no chance to show off her acting talent.
"You have these stereotypes that still dominate films: the nag, the trophy, the escort.
I haven't been sent a nag script yet, but I do get plenty of, like, 'interesting stripper.'"
Even when the actress manages to scrape a role that isn't focused on her looks, audiences
can't help but be drawn to her appearance anyway.
Despite the fact that there are so many other people involved when it comes to making a
movie, it always seems that the actors get the butt of all the criticism.
If you haven't heard of the Razzie Awards yet, don't worry, we're going to tell you
all about it.
The "Razzies" is a parody award show honoring the worst of cinematic under-achievements.
To this day, Sylvester Stallone is the most awarded actor ever with ten awards won while
Madonna is the most awarded actress with nine awards.
Unfortunately - and much to her dismay - Megan has been awarded a Razzie six times.
That's right, six.
That's six times she was given an award for worst actress.
In her defense, some of the Razzies were given to her based on her performance in "Jonah
Hex" and "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen", and it's not like she could really give much
range in those roles because the characters were so limited.
Her attempts at breaking out into more serious
roles don't seem to be going very well either.
In 2019, she played a supporting role in "Above the Shadows", a film about a woman who turns
invisible and has to fight to be seen again.
Released to on-demand platforms in the U.S, the film earned a worldwide box office total
of just $1,190.
- Owch.
A couple of months after the failed box office bomb of "Above the Shadows", the actress returned
to the big screen... in South Korea.
She starred in the Korean War drama "The Battle of Jangsari", which attracted almost nothing
but bad reviews.
The South China Morning Post called it "disposable" and "one-dimensional."
Released in a handful of U.S. theaters, it was a complete fail in Korea.
- Double ouch.
So was this all a string of unfortunate bad luck?
Well, fans seem to think that it could be a little more than that.
Let's put it this way, when most people trash their boss and it somehow manages to get back
to them, they might get a little slap on the wrist or fired.
However, when an actor criticizes their high-powered director along with their movies, it just
might get them blacklisted throughout Hollywood.
While being interviewed for the British magazine Wonderland in 2009, Megan issued a controversial
reply to a question about working with Michael Bay, director of the Transformer movies,
"He's like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad man reputation,"
- in case you needed a reminder, Napoleon was the power-mad general and emperor bent
on conquering Europe in the early 1800s.
But Fox didn't stop there, she added, "He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he
is."
It would be silly to think that everything that happens on set is peaceful and everyone
becomes best friends.
But to compare Michael Bay to Hitler?
That seems to be taking it a little too far.
Fans totally understand if she didn't like the guy, but to openly compare the guy to
the tyrant of World War 2 … yeah, that's harsh.
Megan also didn't have a lot of nice things to say about the actual films either.
She told Entertainment Weekly, "I can't s*** on this movie because it did give me a career
and open all these doors for me.
But I don't want to blow smoke up people's a**.
People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting."
So not only did she trash the director, she trashed the movies too.
It wasn't like this was a private conversation either, her opinions were all given to the
press.
Naturally, Michael Bay found out about what she had to say about him and his movies, and
well, he wasn't very impressed.
Despite everything she had to say, the actress was signed up to reprise her role of Mikaela
Banes for the third Transformers movie, Dark of the Moon, and even attended some rehearsals.
However, Michael Bay's boss, producer Steven Spielberg himself couldn't look past her attitude
towards the films and the Hitler comparison.
Let's not forget, Spielberg directed the film "Schindler's List," he founded the "Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation" to combat bigotry and keep alive the stories
of Holocaust survivors.
So the Hitler joke wasn't taken lightly.
Micahel shared that when the cast got together for a meeting, Megan fox was on her phone
and didn't seem to be paying any attention to what was happening.
So he said to her that in the film business, she's got to remain focused and be wary of
the things that she says.
Spielberg ordered for her to be fired immediately.
However Fox's reps had a different version of the story.
They said, "It was her decision not to return."
But whether the stories from Bay, Spielberg, or Fox are accurate, screenwriters were left
scrambling to rewrite the Dark of the Moon script to create a new character to replace
Fox's role.
After Fox's famous "Hitler comments," three crew members who'd worked on Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen released a savage statement trashing an actress they called "Ms. Sourpants,"
"dumb-as-a-rock," and an actress who would likely wind up "a porn star in the future."
Additionally, they said Fox is "thankless, classless, graceless" and "never smiles."
And it wasn't just the crew that had things to say about the actress.
Even the Transformer's screenwriter said, "She seemed like an actress who didn't want
to be a part of it.
She was saying she wanted to, but she wasn't acting like it."
Whether or not any of their statements were true, the damage was done to Fox's reputation.
Hollywood was given the picture that working with Megan meant that their movie would be
trashed and they'd have to deal with an actress with a terrible attitude.
"Because I had such a fraught relationship with the public, and the media, and journalists,
and I was struggling so much at that time in general, this didn't stand out as a particularly
painful moment, it was just part of the mix."
The actress admitted, after her film "Jennifer's Body" released in 2009, was also met with
a very mixed critical response and lackluster box office returns.
Well, it seems like the one way to get rid of that "hot-girl-next-door" tag, would be
to bad mouth the director and the movies you're working on, because after that, Megan Fox
had a new tag, and it was "difficult".
The actress confessed, "I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just
nothing to do.
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 … so I went through a very dark moment
after that."
However, almost a decade later, it seems like Hollywood might be changing its mind.
"I was brought out and stoned and murdered at one point," Fox confessed, "And then suddenly
everybody's like, 'Wait a second.
We shouldn't have done that.
Let's bring her back.'
Megan has made a comeback, and she describes it as a phoenix rising from the ashes.
The actress opened up about being vindicated in a post-#MeToo Hollywood, where the script
has flipped and women are objecting to being objectified.
She admitted that one night, she promised herself that she would no longer live her
life in fear.
She came home after filming Rogue in 2020, and suddenly her whole life had changed.
She got a divorce and started focusing more on herself and what made her happy.
Suddenly all the work was piling in, and she started dating rapper Machine Gun Kelly.
"Then literally everything exploded from there," she confessed.
The actress plans on being nothing but unapologetic from now on.
The moment that everything seemed to change for Fox, was the moment that she became a
mother in 2012, with her now ex-husband Brian Austin Green.
She went on to have another two boys, and she admitted that becoming a mother was the
best thing that ever happened to her.
Her kids opened up a doorway to a better version of herself.
There's no doubt that the actress has made a lot of changes in her life over the past
ten years, but there's one thing that she knows for sure … she's not afraid of Hollywood
anymore.