Meet Megan Fox in passing, as I did at the GQ shoot, and you may be left with no deeper impression than the one she made on me: a quiet, self-contained girl standing barefoot above Bel Air, her sky-blue robe flapping open to reveal a cutaway swimsuit and a taut, tanned body.
Megan is beautiful. No kidding. She's beautiful in the same way that Bill Gates is wealthy and Barack Obama influential. She is 23 years old, 5'5", curvy as a canyon road and slender as your chances, with long, dark hair, penetrating blue eyes and a full mouth that, when the mood takes her, flashes a smile as wide as a movie screen. In short, as I e-mailed the Editor of this magazine from the set: "Hubba hubba." That's the kind of talk that fancies itself worldly and ironic and hard-bitten but that Megan - who's heard it all before, of course - might correctly identify as "sophomoric". She used that term later, to dismiss the
oeuvre of the comedy writer-director Judd Apatow, and by that stage of our acquaintance I wasn't at all surprised.
One-on-one, Megan is disarmingly forthright. But on the shoot she was a closed book. Attractively jacketed, certainly, but closed.
Between each setup she shrugged on her robe and retreated to the comfort of her iPhone.
Our first conversation did not go well. I asked her about arrangements for our meeting the following day. Pressed for a suggestion of what she'd like to do, she wondered if I'd enjoy a game of Lord Of The Rings Trivial Pursuit. The correct answer to this was, clearly, "Yes." But suddenly I felt old, and foolish. "I wouldn't know any of the answers," I said. "It wouldn't be much fun for you. Like playing tennis against a man with no arms." Like
what? I had to repeat the stupid, tactless remark. She didn't laugh. For a dreadful second, I worried she might have an armless loved-one. How to rescue the situation? Could we play a different game? Harry Potter Cluedo? Narnia Monopoly? (Twister? No, I didn't say Twister.)
It was too late. The moment had gone. Instead of quizzing each other on our knowledge of Middle Earth, we would have lunch. No games would be played. I had only myself to blame, but I was prepared for our interview to be a struggle.
All of which only goes to show how wrong a first impression can be.
The next day, trailed by car-loads of paparazzi, Megan drove her white Mercedes 4x4 from her house in the hills to my hotel, the Sunset Marquis, in West Hollywood. We sat in the garden and talked - and talked, and talked. Initially, it was difficult to square this breathless conversationalist with the guarded glamourpuss from the shoot. Simon Pegg, who starred with Megan in the 2008 comedy
How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, experienced a similar confusion after working with her for a short time. "I remember the first time we had a drink and chatted for a while,"
Pegg says. "She absolutely floored me because whereas before there'd been this quiet wallflower who got nervous about doing scenes, suddenly there was this extraordinary, outspoken, complex, smart, experienced person. She's a contradiction, I think. "I think she was sometimes doing stuff she wasn't entirely comfortable with," Pegg says of Megan's attitude to filming How To Lose Friends... "Oddly, for someone who looks as good as she does in her underwear, I think she finds it really difficult being seen that way."
Josh Duhamel, who acts alongside Megan in this month's
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, remembers watching her walk on to the set in New Mexico last year, in front of 300 American military personnel. "It was interesting to watch their reaction," he says. "These guys love her and she gets all their attention. And it can't help but be difficult and uncomfortable.
That scrutiny can't not affect you. It's tough, especially for a young girl."
Megan's own explanation for her occasional diffidence is simple. "I'm shy," she says. "More now than ever." This would be less of a hindrance were it not for the fact that currently she is the most lusted-after young actress in Hollywood. And *Transformers:
Revenge Of The Fallen*, sequel to the 2007 blockbuster that made her a star, will only reinforce her position. "Based on" the cartoon "based on" the plastic toy range popular in the Eighties, and directed by the explosive Michael Bay, of Bad Boys and
Armageddon distinction, the first Transformers was a monster hit; it took more than $700m worldwide. In the sequel Megan again plays Mikaela Banes, the "evil jock concubine" - "I guess I just have a weakness for tight abs and big arms," she purrs - who turns out to be a resourceful grease monkey.
If Transformers was really a romance between a boy - played by Shia LaBeouf - and his Chevy Camaro (or between the General Motors marketing department, toymaker Hasbro, and co-producers Dreamworks and Paramount) then it was also something less cynical: the film in which the young men of the world fell in love with Megan Fox. Squeezed into Mikaela's immodest pink crop top and her belted denim micro mini, it scarcely needs explaining why she made such an impression. "It's kind of hypnotic, how beautiful she is," says Simon Pegg. "I remember when she walked into the room the first time on How To Lose Friends..., everyone kind of disappeared into a fog. And I couldn't always keep eye contact with her when we talked. It was like looking into a really bright light."
That she is herself an avid consumer of sci-fi, comic books and fantasy films - a geek in the body of a superheroine - has only endeared her further to 14-year-old boys of all ages. But while it's true that she has an encyclopedic knowledge of all that fanboy stuff, Megan's interests are wider, and her opinions a good deal more trenchant, than those of your average horny adultescent.
Previously, she has attracted admiration and censure in equal measure for slagging off Disney - comments she stands by - and for revealing a teenage infatuation with a stripper called Nikita. "I didn't make that up but I totally made it more colourful than it was," she says. "It was made to seem a very sexual thing. In reality, it wasn't. She was a girl and I was attracted to her, but it wasn't like we were rubbing oil on each other. Journalists don't always convey what I say as a joke. They print it as if I meant it literally."
During our conversation she says a lot of things that I will now take literally, proving, if nothing else, her point about journalists being duplicitous shape-shifters. Actors, she says, "are the worst assholes to have to hang out with". They are "either narcissistic douche bags or raging alcoholics". (Simon Pegg disputes this. He says he's a "narcissistic alcoholic".)
She says that the self-appointed guardians of America's morals are "fucking Protestant uptight Bible-beating misogynists". She adds that those people think of her as "a big whore" because she has spoken frankly about her sex life. She adopts a whiny voice to impersonate a detractor. "People are like, 'You're trailer trash.
Look at your tattoos and the way you talk. Trailer trash.'"
She is fantastically condemnatory of Sex And The City. "So tragic." Costume dramas? "They bore me. I think they're absurd."
Hollywood comedies? "Total garbage, not funny at all." Industry parties? "Fake bullshit." Fame? "It doesn't mean anything. Anyone can be famous." Life in America? "A dumbed-down version of existence." TV news? "Mindless bullshit." Transformers director Michael Bay? "Such a dick." America's war on drugs? "It's all propaganda. I can't tell you how much bullshit I've been through because I will openly say that I smoke weed... People look at it like it's this crazy, hippy, fucked-up thing to do. And it's not! I hope they legalise it and when they do I'll be the first fucking person in line to buy my pack of joints."
As for men, we are "Weak. Like puppies." Men who hit on her? "Retards. Ridiculous. So pathetic!"
She's uncommonly good on the strange nature of her job. "Acting is a very weird thing. We get paid to feign attraction and love. When you think about it, we're kind of prostitutes. Other people are paying to watch us kissing someone, touching someone, doing things people in a normal monogamous relationship would never do with anyone who's not their partner. It's really kind of gross."
Unlike many actors, she wouldn't date a co-star. "I think that's never a good idea. It doesn't end well because it doesn't start from a legitimate place. It's like a weird brainwash situation."
Screen kissing is a nightmare. "Oh, my God! It's fucking gross!
It's a super-intimate thing to do. Touching mouths? I have to really enjoy someone's personality, not just their looks, before I'll kiss them. This one kid I had to kiss had just eaten. And he passed a piece of whatever it was [from his mouth to hers]. I swear to God. Not on purpose. Like it was in his tooth or something? And it was really salty. I'm not making this up. I almost cried. I was a bitch the rest of the day. God bless him, he was very sweet. But that's gross."
Where did she come from, this funny, dramatic, wildly gesticulating girl? What did she do with the remote, wary young woman on the shoot?
It's not that she's suddenly supremely confident. She's not. She laughs a lot, and her sentences come in surges, but she's fidgety and uncertain, and if the above agglomeration of exclamations makes her sound strident, it's not intended to. Throughout our interview she shifts in her seat, wrapping and unwrapping an oatmeal shawl that covers and then uncovers her cleavage. Under the shawl she is wearing a low-cut pink and black camisole; tight, ripped jeans; and peep-toe ankle boots. Most of her numerous tattoos are invisible when she's dressed, but there's one of Marilyn Monroe's head on the inside of her forearm that I can't help noticing. "She's just the perfect example of how you can be eaten alive by this industry," says Megan, explaining the impetus behind having a dead star's face inked on her body. "She's still very relevant. Nothing has changed."
The second daughter of a parole officer and a mother who worked at a variety of jobs to make ends meet, Megan was born in tiny Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a base for the Manhattan Project, where America created the atomic bomb (insert feeble human incendiary device joke here). She grew up in nearby Rockwood. "It's like a semi-mountain town, very rural," she remembers. "My dad used to hunt ducks and my mom would put them in the pot. We lived really modestly. We had very little money."
Her parents split when she was young and her mother later remarried, at which point the family moved to Florida. She was ten, and most of her early memories date from this time. "I love the beach and I love sunshine," she says, though she doesn't surf any more because of a fear of sharks. (Megan is as encyclopedic on sharks as she is on Tolkien; if it all goes wrong in Hollywood, she'd walk into a job on a men's magazine.)
Her childhood was "relatively happy". She says she "wasn't traumatised" by the divorce but she missed her father - she mentions the effect of his absence on her more than once - and his replacement (no longer with her mother) was strict. She wasn't allowed to have friends over or to visit their homes. She did not enjoy school. Her sister, now a child psychologist in Florida, is 13 years older than her and her mother worked long hours, so she spent a lot of time alone, if not lonely.
She describes herself as "obnoxiously outgoing" as a child. "I would put on shows in our living room. It wasn't even a need to perform. I just always wanted everyone's attention to be focused on me."
The sad thing is, as soon as she got her wish and became famous, she found she didn't want the attention after all. "I grew up craving the spotlight and once it happened I immediately recoiled," she says. "Up until the very moment it happened I was really outgoing. Now I'm really introverted. I thought that I would love it, that this was the kind of life I wanted, that everyone wanted.
And it's not all that it seems."
She seems genuinely disappointed by celebrity. "I don't know what I expected," she says. "It just always seemed really glamorous. As a child you think everyone who's famous is very wealthy and very powerful. I felt like, once I achieved that success then all of my internal issues would be solved and I would be this really confident person. And I'm not. "It's not just physical insecurity," she says. "It's also a feeling of not being acceptable, and wanting to be. Of course I think that has something to do with my parents' divorce and not seeing my dad and always feeling rejected. You don't ever really get past that."
Megan's search for fame began early. At 14 she was a catalogue model, and around the same time she started auditioning for acting jobs. She had a part in an Olsen twins TV movie, and then travelled to LA with her mother for pilot season, the annual round of cattle calls for TV shows. She stayed in Oakwood, a huge apartment complex in Burbank that caters specifically to child performers ("horrible... tragic"), which at least had the advantage of getting her out of her tiny Christian school back in Florida ("awful").
At 17 she had a supporting role in a Lindsay Lohan film,
Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen, and at 18 she started work on a sitcom, Hope & Faith, in New York.
She moved to a tiny apartment on Chrystie Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She hated it. "I was really isolated. I never went out. I had no friends. I was just on my own in the apartment the whole time." In the winter, when it got cold, she became so unwilling to leave home that on one occasion she scraped the sugared coating off dog biscuits with her teeth, just for something to eat. "I ran out of food. I ran out of water. I ran out of everything." She laughs about it now, but it sounds like Megan was really quite unhappy, and not for the last time.
In London in the summer of 2007 to film *How To Lose Friends
& Alienate People*, she once again found herself alone and lonely. "If you ask Simon [Pegg]," she says, "he'll only say lovely things. He won't say anything rude or accurate. But I was a total psychotic nightmare. I'd just come off the press tour for
Transformers and this sounds so stupid but I had an extreme case of jet lag. That combined with the seasonal disorder
[Megan apparently has SAD], I just got really manic-depressive. I was not pleasant."
Her summer in London consisted for the most part of hiding in her room at Claridge's, "in the dark. On my own. Every day." Surely she's exaggerating? "Ask my agent. When I was not working I wouldn't leave my room for weeks at a time. They thought I was dead." "I know she had a hard time during How To Lose Friends...," says Simon Pegg. "I always felt I could have done more to help her, in a way. It wasn't till halfway through that I realised she was suffering a little bit. "I remember coming in one morning and she was in tears because she had to stay another day in London. I know how that feels because I've been through that in LA. When you're away from home and you're stuck in a hotel room it can drive you insane. She told me she'd been staying in her room playing with a piece of string. We were laughing about it. I went off to props that day and I got a ball of string and left it in her trailer with a note saying, 'Don't worry.
You'll be home soon.'"
Sometimes, Megan says of her life in general, "there's a really overwhelming sense of loneliness. Because no one knows me yet everyone knows me. It's a really bizarre feeling. Kind of otherworldly."
Her reaction to her fame, in the wake of Transformers, was fairly extreme. Acknowledging that her success was almost entirely a product of her looks, she revolted. "Really my only job is to look attractive," she says. "I was so angry about that, that I went in the opposite direction. I turned into a really butch bull dyke for, like, six months. I would dress as a boy, in giant oversized clothes and skate shoes. I was not taking care of myself, smoking two packs a day. Then I went in the other direction. From being a giant motorcycle-riding lesbian, I turned into a zombie. I lost, like, 30lbs."
This was last year, when she was prepping for her part in this autumn's Jennifer's Body, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody's follow-up to her 2007 hit, Juno. It's quite a departure from the kooky comedy that made Cody's name: Megan plays a high-school hottie who is possessed by a demon and must eat the flesh of boys to stay alive. "I was like, 'I'm losing weight for the movie,'" continues Megan. "I was telling myself I was being Method, which was so outrageous and ridiculous and not true. But I ended up getting sick and my hair started falling out and I was like, 'Oh, fuck. I can't do this.'"
Wait. Her hair started falling out? "You lose too much weight, you're not getting your vitamins, you get sick. I was really skinny. I was depressed."
It's not just her own neuroses that bedevil her. At one point I ask Megan if, before she made it, she'd ever been lured on to the casting couch. "Any casting couch shit I've experienced has been
since I've become famous," she says. "It's really so heartbreaking. Some of these people!" Like, producers? "Like, Hollywood legends. You think you're going to meet them and you're so excited, like, 'I can't believe this person wants to have a conversation with me,' and you get there and you realise that's not what they want, at all. It's happened a lot this year actually. "There are some guys," she says, "talking about actors who have been in the business for a while, who are very egocentric and have been able to sleep with a lot of girls for whatever reason, and because they don't know me they think I'm going to be this little cupcake, this Marilyn Monroe type who's going to bat my eyes and be like a receptacle for them. I just shut them down immediately, right in front of people. It's been so long since someone has told them no, they don't really know how to deal with it. Because of this non-reality they live in, they're fucked up, psychologically."
Megan feels such people are encouraged to approach her by her misrepresentative public persona. "I have this sort of promiscuous image. People assume that I'm really overly sexually aggressive and that I'm this wild child. And I'm not like that at all. I think they've consumed this image that is partly fabricated."
But she won't be censored. "I feel like most people in this business aim to make an image that is really very politically correct, and very android-like. It's obviously not them. We're all human. We all do horrible things and great things. I would rather have an image that is wild and promiscuous than to go out of my way to be proper all of the time."
Megan is scathing of famous women who present a prissy façade in public because that's what convention demands. "They all sit on
David Letterman in their little summer dresses with their legs crossed and talk about how much they love going green and they love [Toyota] Priuses... None of them are real people. They play into exactly what society says women should be. And I'm not going to do that. I mean, I think it's great to want to save the environment. So do I. But I don't want to sit and just talk about that."
So we don't talk about that. We keep talking about her. Megan describes herself as a loner. "I close myself off from people," she says. She also says that she doesn't have any friends. OK, there is a girl back in Florida called Crystal who she e-mails but apart from her, "I have people in my life because they work for me, or people who are acquaintances, but nobody in this business really has friends."
This part I have to take issue with. What about Brian Austin Green, her boyfriend of almost five years? Brian whose name she has tattooed across her pelvis? Brian, 13 years her senior, once a teen star of Beverly Hills: 90210? "I don't want to talk about it," she says at first. "I'd rather keep that aspect of my life private."
Later, though, she talks about it. Recently the American tabloids and celebrity blogs have been alive with rumours that Brian and Megan, at one time engaged to be married, have split up. "Whether or not he is currently my boyfriend or we are romantically involved, he's always going to be a really good friend of mine,"
Megan says. "We had a very serious relationship..." She stops and starts again. "We had/have a very serious relationship. I was 18 when it started. It was very committed and monogamous for five years and that doesn't just go away. He's always going to be somebody I care about and somebody I trust. He's very protective of me and he cares deeply about me. I have a feeling he's always going to be around, whatever the relationship dynamic is."
Was it the pressure of her growing fame that altered the relationship? "I don't know if it's that. Once you're at a level like Angelina and Brad then that obviously will add pressure, but I'm not at that level at all. So that doesn't affect my relationship. But I think the business does, the odd hours we keep and the different locations. In the past year I was in Egypt and New Mexico and Canada. I'm all over the place all the time. That's hard."
She'll be just as all-over-the place for the rest of this year. By the time you read this Megan will have completed work on Jonah Hex, a supernatural Western based on a comic book, and perhaps started on The Crossing, a thriller about a kidnapping in Mexico; she will have begun a world tour to promote
Transformers; and she'll be preparing to do the same for
Jennifer's Body; she'll be working towards the production of Fathom, again based on a comic, in which she will play the lead character, an "aquatic humanoid" (not a mermaid, she tells me). There's also talk of her playing an angel opposite the resurrected Mickey Rourke in Passion Plays. And, if the endlessly repeated gossip is to be believed - sadly, it probably isn't - she will soon be filling Angelina Jolie's boob tube as Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider movie. Megan prefers not to comment on any of this industry tittle-tattle, not because she's coy, more because she doesn't want to jinx anything. Career-wise, she can't complain. Jennifer's Body is a big deal, her chance to show she's more than just a pretty face and an awesome physique. Jonah Hex pairs her with Josh Brolin, currently riding his own wave of acclaim and success. After that, who knows? "She's got a brilliant head on her shoulders," says Simon Pegg. "If she doesn't let Hollywood swallow her she should survive it. I think she's got the smarts to navigate that world but at the same time she is incredibly vulnerable. It's fair to say she had a complex upbringing and in some respects her intellect is at odds with her appearance. And I think she's got a hill to climb because of what people assume about her, primarily because of the way she looks. There are a lot of genuinely good actors out there who are written off as being eye candy and I think Megan is definitely a victim of that." "People tend to only see how beautiful she is," agrees Josh Duhamel, her Transformers co-star. "Really she's very talented, and very bright. And I think she is a lot more comfortable now than she was. I think she's grown a lot. Once she learns to trust in herself, she's going to be unstoppable." "You know," Megan says, "two weeks ago I went through a bump of depression. But now I think I'm really good. All this opportunity has fallen in my lap that I'm grateful for. I'm able to easily support myself financially. I feel like I'm growing out of that struggle I was going through to push away all the attention. Like I woke up and said, 'This is so stupid. Instead of fighting this I should be rejoicing that my only job is to get up, take a shower, do my hair and look attractive.' I was being a brat. So I stopped."
After three hours of talking we're both getting a little dazed. I walk Megan out to collect her car. Immediately the paparazzi set upon her, running at us from every angle, shutters clicking. "You know what?" she says, head down, "I'm going to wait inside." We go back and hover awkwardly in the lobby of the hotel while a valet brings her car around. Then she kisses me goodbye and makes a dash for it. Perhaps two hours later, back in my room, I google her and there she is, looking lovely, if harassed. "Transformers star shows off her assets in a low-cut top," trumpets one site. "Megan Fox: Sexy At Sunset Marquis" announces another. "Is anyone looking at the torn jeans?" asks thedailyfix.com
Can it really be worth it, I ask her, all this hassle? "Listen,"
Megan tells me. "If Jessica Alba can handle it, so can I." That's our girl.
