Megan Fox: ‘The Hollywood of my time was a misogynistic hell’

One of the most successful horror films of recent times was M3GAN (2022), the story of an artificial intelligence in the form of a children’s doll that developed homicidal tendencies. It’s not hard to imagine someone in an office thinking it would be funny to exploit the movie’s title to cast Megan Fox, 38, as the robot M3GAN. On September 13, Subservience was released in U.S. theaters, a science fiction thriller with erotic overtones where the actress who rose to fame for Transformers (2007) plays a cyborg nanny, acquired by a father to temporarily replace his hospitalized wife and take care of the housework. As is easy to guess, the situation soon escalates into a The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) scenario, with the robot trying to take control of the family and the husband’s affection at all costs.

Although this co-production between Bulgaria and the United States is unlikely to be the platform that returns Fox to the A-list — in the U.S. it has gone directly to the online rental market, without a theatrical release — Subservience is the actress’s latest attempt to relaunch her career from a profile closer to action, after years where she has barely made the headlines beyond her on-off relationship with singer Machine Gun Kelly. Last year she participated in her first big-budget film in a decade, Expend4bles, where she played Jason Statham’s partner, dished out a few blows and stood out in a cast full of 1980s action stars. Similarly in 2021, when the world was still in semi-confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic, she received surprisingly good reviews for Till Death, a survival thriller also shot in Bulgaria that had a simultaneous release in theaters and on streaming platforms. In Subservience, she teams up again with the same director, S.K. Dale.

Ironically, her new film will share the billing with Transformers One, the latest instalment (this time in animation form) of the long-running franchise with which Fox made her name in Hollywood. Her high-profile dismissal from the saga marked, among other events, the end of her period of highest popularity, after she compared director Michael Bay to Hitler — and, at the same time, Napoleon — in a 2009 interview with Wonderland magazine, while Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was still showing in theaters.

“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant,” she said.

Bay, two years later, did not cast Fox in the third film, although he said he was not upset with her and attributed the decision to exclude her to executive producer Steven Spielberg. To move past the conflict, Bay gave her the role of reporter April O’Neil in the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films he produced in 2014 and 2016, which were poorly received.

The mother of three children aged 11, 10, and eight with fellow actor Brian Austin Green (with whom she follows a non-binary parenting method), Fox grew up in an evangelical family with a stepfather who, according to her, was verbally, mentally, and emotionally abusive. She made her movie debut in secondary roles in vehicles for the Olsen twins or Lindsay Lohan and, before Transformers, when she was still a minor, she had her first encounter with Bay as an uncredited extra in Bad Boys II (2003), in a scene set up in a strip club. “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,” the actress told Jimmy Kimmel in 2009.

With the advent of the #MeToo movement, statements like that — to which Kimmel could think of nothing better to respond with than the awkward joke: “Yeah well, that’s really a microcosm of how all of our minds work” — and the constant sexualization Fox suffered during that period (especially in men’s magazines) were re-examined and led to the actress’s career being looked at from a different perspective. Fox, in any case, did not publicly air any stories of abuse. “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,” she told The New York Times. “I just didn’t think based on how I’d been received by people, and by feminists, that I would be a sympathetic victim.”

It cannot be said that more recent films starring the actress after Ninja Turtles, including the vilified Zeroville (2019), directed by James Franco, or Midnight in the Switchgrass (2021), developed a devoted audience. On the artistic level, Fox attracted more interest during this period for her 2023 collection of poems Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, and the revelations that emerged from it: from the abusive relationship she confessed to having suffered with someone unspecified, to the words of love and heartbreak she dedicated to Machine Gun Kelly. On television, she appeared in the sitcom New Girl from 2016 to 2017 and created a documentary series, Legends Of The Lost (2018), based on her interest in archaeological mysteries and theories about ancient alien civilizations (Fox has also spoken publicly about astrology and energies).

However, one of Fox’s movies that has been progressively talked about and garnered praised over the years is the horror film Jennifer’s Body (2009), whose failure at the time of its release, linked to the subsequent financial disaster of Jonah Hex (2010), an adaptation of a DC comic, was seen as the actress’s swansong in Hollywood. In that movie, the actress played a high school student who, as a consequence of a failed Satanic rite, begins to feed on men attracted by her charms. The promotion focused, paradoxically, on Fox’s physique, which directly distorted the subject it dealt with. Victoria Santamaría Ibor, a research professor at the University of Zaragoza and author of I Eat Boys: Monstrous Femininity in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ (2022), explains to EL PAÍS that the film is “nowadays revered by many not only as a cult movie in horror cinema, but also as a feminist film ahead of its time,” a symbol that there has indeed been a change in the public’s perception of its star as a result of the #MeToo movement.

For Santamaría, director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Diablo Cody used the star’s image as a “sexually active woman” in the film to inform their discourse: “Jennifer’s Body exaggerates Megan Fox’s image as a sex symbol and deforms it to the point of making it monstrous. The film has an ironic tone towards Fox’s own image, an actress who has only interested Hollywood in relation to her sexuality. Instead of being a sexual object for men, Jennifer [Fox’s character] is the one who treats men as objects of consumption. Her sexuality is directly linked to her monstrosity: she is an insatiable woman who consumes boys as if they were beauty products.”

The academic recalls that the actress “was ridiculed as a result of her statements about how uncomfortable she had felt in Transformers” and that “many of her statements have positioned her as someone who says what she thinks, no matter how irreverent or controversial it may be. She is not the perfect victim, nor has she ever tried to be one,” she adds, noting that “she has always felt rejected by the public and that there has been little effort to understand her.”

In recent interviews, Fox has also expressed pride in the belated recognition of Jennifer’s Body, which she has consistently defended, and in the way the film engaged with her stardom. “I think there has been a pervasive perception of me as a shallow succubus, if that makes any sense, for at least the first decade of my career,” she told The Washington Post in 2021. “I was so lost and trying to understand, like, how am I supposed to feel value or find purpose in this horrendous, patriarchal, misogynistic hell that was Hollywood at the time. Because I had already been speaking out against it and everyone, including other women, received me in a very negative way for doing it.”

In that article, where the actress also declared she felt connected to Joan of Arc and “all the persecuted women throughout history,” there was talk of a “renaissance” for Fox following Till Death. Such a prediction is still far from being fulfilled, but, 15 years after Jennifer’s Body, those who enjoyed that cannibal version of the performer can at least find solace in theaters watching her robot in Subservience weakening a man or two.

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