Megan Fox has been an integral part of Hollywood since Transformers and largely disappeared from the screen in the 2010s. We’ll tell you what the actress is doing today.
After Megan Fox rose to the A-list of Hollywood actresses in the mid-2000s with Michael Bay’s sci-fi actioner Transformers and its sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, she lost more and more big roles and prestige in the years that followed. Fox has now largely disappeared from the industry and is more likely to make headlines with her private life. Read on to find out what led to this and which projects are currently in the works for Fox.
Megan Fox became a world star with Transformers – but that had its pitfalls.
Fox made her breakthrough as an actress within a few years, after she began in Hollywood in the early 2000s with supporting roles and appeared in films such as Confessions of a High School Diva alongside Lindsay Lohan and an episode of Two and a Half Men. In 2007, she landed the lead role in Michael Bay’s action blockbuster Transformers, which finally helped her to worldwide fame.
According to The Observer (via The Guardian ), she is said to have auditioned for the role by washing Michael Bay’s private Ferrari at his Hollywood mansion and was recorded doing so. According to Fox, Bay later claimed that the recording of it had disappeared. When asked about this in an interview, Bay claimed that he no longer knew where the recording was either.
After she returned in the sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Fox made several statements about Michael Bay that led to her being fired from the franchise. She compared the director to dictators like Napoleon and Hitler, which studio head Steven Spielberg is said to have objected to, as Bay later explained in an interview with GQ.
Fox often talked about her collaboration with Bay, repeatedly mentioning his inappropriate behavior. In 2011, she told the British magazine Wonderland:
It makes a difference [whether you’re a good actress]. Not for Michael Bay, because his instructions are sometimes word-for-word: ‘Be hot.’ I once had a question on the set. ‘Mike,’ I said. ‘Who am I talking to? Where should I look?’ And he replied, ‘Just be sexy.’ I get angry when people talk to me like that.
Watch the trailer for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen here:
When she first stood in front of the camera for Bay at the age of just 15 as an extra for Bad Boys II, the director wanted to see her wearing a bikini and high heels, dancing under a waterfall, as she revealed in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel (via Entertainment Weekly ):
We were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in wearing a polka-dot bikini and a red cowboy hat and high heels. They brought me in like that, and Mike just nodded it through. And they said, ‘Michael, she’s 15, she can’t be sitting at the bar with a drink in her hand.’
And his solution was to put me dancing under a waterfall, under which I got soaking wet. And that was… I was 15. I was in 10th grade. That’s pretty much the microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.
The sexualization and staging of her person in Bays’ films naturally rubbed off on the public, who perceived Fox accordingly. For years, she was voted one of the sexiest women alive in top lists by magazines like FHM from 2008 to 2013, which in turn had a major influence on her further film roles.
After Transformers, Megan Fox made a name for herself in the film industry
After she had to leave the Transformers franchise, Fox was in the then-unrecognized and now celebrated horror comedy Jennifer’s Body – guys to her liking. Even today, Fox considers the indie flick by Karyn Kusama to be the best film of her career.
This was followed by roles in box-office and critical flops like Jonah Hex or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as indie films like Taurus and Good Mourning, alongside her then-fiancé Machine Gun Kelly. Today, Megan Fox rarely visits the industry and tends to make cameo appearances and take on supporting roles, such as in the 2023 action hit The Expendables 4.
In March 2024, she spoke again on the podcast Call Her Daddy about the strong sexualization of herself in films and the subsequent sexualization by the public, explaining that she couldn’t do anything right and that she was permanently judged for her appearance, both ways. She also made headlines with statements about her toxic on-and-off relationship with musician Machine Gun Kelly, from whom she is now expecting a baby, according to People.
