When
you’re a young woman in Hollywood who, like Megan Fox, has had a kind of
sudden, massive fameconferred upon you—a fame that some argue is not
necessarily commensurate with your work or even your talent—you have several
options: You can move quickly to cash in on your popularity (e.g. make a
record, launch a clothing line, do a reality show); you can go out of your way
to make penance for your “unearned” success by signing on for serious
projects of a certain artistic or social quality that are ultimately neither
very artistic nor very social and don’t actually make any
money (it’s very important that they don’t make any money—even accidentally);
you can freak out, act out, and burn out; you can reject it all and run away
and hide; or you can very quickly become hardened by the entire process. In
short, while there are obvious perks to immediate, quaking celebrity (e.g. some
money, a certain amount of power, free Vitaminwater), the well-worn escape
routes are not entirely appealing.
"I did
take baton-twirling lessons for a while. I was on a jump-rope team when I was
in 10th grade. We were called the Jumping Jackets."—Megan Fox
At the age of 24, Fox has already appeared in two
blockbuster movies—Michael Bay’s CGI-robot juggernaut Transformers
(2007), and its sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen—which,
combined, have grossed more than $1.5billion worldwide. Over the last few
years, she has also done a series of other non-Transformers films,
including How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008), and the
campyDiablo Cody–written thriller Jennifer’s Body—the bulk of which have
quickly wilted at the box office. But Fox’s penchant for offering up certain
intimate-seeming details of her life in interviews—such as the same-sex romance
that she once claimed to have had with a stripper named Nikita, or the location
of her boyfriend Brian Austin Green’s name on her body she had tattooed (it’s
in her lower swimsuit area)—has provided an entertaining sideshow.
She’s also good about unprompted name-checks (“If I
could just be Angelina [Jolie]’s girlfriend, I would be so happy.” “I want to
eat Robert Pattinson.” “Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a
mountain ox with my bare hands.”)
For years, the great revelatory insights about the way
pop culture works were that celebrity is about image and that we like to build
people up in order to bring them down. But for an actress like Fox, who came of
age in the era of reality TV, social media, and second-to-second news cycles,
these aspects of celebrity mythmaking (and breaking) are almost elementary. Fox
herself has acknowledged as much, offering that some of the more outrageous
things she has said in interviews were purely for effect, because—as an
aforementioned a young actress in
Hollywood who has had conferred upon her sudden,
massive fame—she knows that she is playing a role, that we live in a culture
evermore about images, sound bites,
and archetypes, and she has decided that she needs to manipulate the system in order to avoid being consumed by it. It’s somewhat cynical, yes, and true that she is self-invented (as most famous people are), but in Fox’s case, the persona she has created and the way she has seemed to process her own fame hints at an underlying element of self-preservation at work. Fox says outrageous things. She takes sexy pictures. She looks good on film. But she doesn’t try to pull at your heartstrings by pretending to bare her soul. She doesn’t attempt to demystify herself through overexplanation. She doesn’t try to really prove anything to you. She just gives you what she thinks you want and keeps the important stuff for herself.
and archetypes, and she has decided that she needs to manipulate the system in order to avoid being consumed by it. It’s somewhat cynical, yes, and true that she is self-invented (as most famous people are), but in Fox’s case, the persona she has created and the way she has seemed to process her own fame hints at an underlying element of self-preservation at work. Fox says outrageous things. She takes sexy pictures. She looks good on film. But she doesn’t try to pull at your heartstrings by pretending to bare her soul. She doesn’t attempt to demystify herself through overexplanation. She doesn’t try to really prove anything to you. She just gives you what she thinks you want and keeps the important stuff for herself.
Fox’s next two films—Jonah Hex, with Josh
Brolin, Michael Fassbender, and John Malkovich, and Passion Play, with
Mickey Rourke and Bill Murray—are both departures, the former a sci-fi
comic-book Western about a horrifically scarred cowboy with a spiritual hole in
his heart, the latter a magical-realist drama in which Fox’s character sprouts
wings at puberty and is drafted into a traveling circus. “I want to do
different things,” said Fox, calling one early-May afternoon from Los Angeles,
where she was busy preparing to film the third installment of Transformers.
“I mean, Transformers is enormous, but it’s exhausting because it’s just
this huge, huge machine,” she continued. “The studio, the director—everyone has
so much power in this project that the actors are sort of very small in the
midst of this very large movie.” Days later, it was announced that Fox would no
longer be a part of Transformers 3. In a statement, she said that it was
her decision, though some reports cited her rumored frosty relationship with
Bay as the primary reason for her exit. (In an interview last year, she
described Bay as a “tyrant” and, for typical Foxian effect, likened his on-set
workaday methods to those of Napoleon and Hitler.)
Now, as the door closes on Transformers, Fox is
imagining a very different kind of career—and life—beyond it. To ensure we
provided her with an ample foil, we recruited comedian Zach Galifianakis to
interview her for this story—and he boldly went where few men have gone Before.
One final note: At the end of the photo shoot that
accompanies this interview, which took place at the Chateau Marmont in L.A.,
Fox asked if she could keep the head of the mannequin seen in the story, which
was made to look exactly like her, as a souvenir. When the concern was raised
that the paparazzi perched outside the hotel might get a picture of her
leaving, ostensibly, carrying her own head, Fox didn’t blanch. She
didn’t stop and worry about what the tabloids might do with such an image, what
people might say. I mean, what would the caption be? She didn’t wring
her hands or furrow her brow. She just threw her head in a shopping bag and
went on her way.
"I’m not
pretentious enough to just sit around and think about how I’m a tool for the
whole Hollywood machine. But it has crossed my mind."—Megan Fox
Interview Magazine Megan Fox By Zach Galifianakis, Photography Craig Mcdean (The Artcle is from june 10. 2010)
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