When Megan Fox was two, she told her mum she was going to be an actress. Not that she wanted to be an actress, but that she was going to be one.
“Sometimes I just know things,” she explains. “I accidentally tap into stuff sometimes. I used to do it as a kid, and I do it as an adult. I crossed over and saw a future string.”
String, as in string theory. Fox is into stuff like that. She’s also spiritual. On her Instagram profile, she describes herself thusly: “Child of the Cherokee Tribe … forest nymph … Lunar Leo mother goddess to 2 bohemian revolutionaries-my kamikaze free spirit & my peaceful warrior.”
As a girl growing up in Tennessee in the United States, Fox was raised a Pentecostal Christian, speaking in tongues and falling down on the floor. She’s no longer a member of the church, but her upbringing opened her eyes to the spiritual world.
Fox is here in an otherwise barren conference room to talk about her new film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows. She’s pregnant, though you can barely tell with the flowy lace dress she has on. The actress, 30, is about to have her third child with former 90210 star Brian Austin Green, whom she married when she was 24.
Their relationship is complicated: Fox filed for divorce last fall, but now that she’s pregnant with his child, the tabloids say they’re considering getting back together.
In Ninja Turtles Fox once again plays broadcaster April O’Neil. And nine weeks after she gives birth to her third baby, she’ll return to Fox’s sitcom New Girl, on which her arc this season as Zooey Deschanel’s deadpan roommate earned her strong critical reviews.
‘I have other skill sets and gifts that are much, much stronger that I am obligated to exercise and use. I’m really more intellectually minded,’ says Fox.
Despite that success, Fox isn’t sure she wants to follow her string theory vision anymore. “I don’t think acting is my ultimate passion,” she says about a week before the Ninja Turtles opening.
“I have other skill sets and gifts that are much, much stronger that I am obligated to exercise and use. I’m really more intellectually minded. I’ve always been into alternative history, antiquities, archaeology. I’ve always been really consumed by these deep mysteries that exist on our planet that can’t be explained today by science. They eat away at me.”
It all started, she continues, on the set of 2009’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, partly filmed in Egypt. She and costar Shia LaBeouf were given a tour of the Great Pyramid of Giza by the Ministry of Antiquities and someone “high-ranking in that field” told the actors that the pyramid was never actually a tomb.
“They presume there may have been some type of energy plant at some point,” says Fox. “And that sparked in me an interest in really exposing this sort of sort of thing, because I realized I have access to things I shouldn’t have access to because of what I do for a living,” says Fox.
OK, but what does this all mean for Fox? Is she going to become a docent at the Natural Museum of History? Host a History Channel show on which she goes on archaeological digs?
“It might be something like that,” she says of the latter suggestion. “If I ended up working for Vice, that would be a dream. I don’t know how that could ever work, but I do have a little bit of a journalistic streak and I’m also reckless enough to do well in that field, I think.”
Reckless. It’s a word synonymous with Fox since those Transformers movies, during which she had a notorious spat with director Michael Bay.
The director and the actress patched things up after the third Transformers film, when Fox e-mailed Bay to apologise for her behaviour. “I was, like, hey, the movie is about to come out and it’s gonna be huge. Congratulations.”
He accepted her apology, which is what led to her role in the Turtles series, which Bay produces. But the fracas taught Fox a lot about controlling her impulses, she says.
As a result of the drama, many directors are afraid of Fox. But Dave Green, who directed the Turtles sequel, insists he didn’t feel that way. “I didn’t let those ideas intermingle with actually getting to know her,” he says.
Fox says she often feels misunderstood, largely because of her drop-dead gorgeous looks. If she is sent 10 scripts, five of them will include offers for roles as a prostitute or an escort.
“You know how women that are always cast in James Bond movies are pinups but their job in the movies is always being a marine biologist or neuroscientist?” she asks.
“I think people react to me that way. Like, ‘Right, she’s studying neurobiology.’ But I am really interested in that.”
None of this, however, has resulted in Fox playing down her looks. In the opening scene of the new Turtles film, Fox runs through Grand Central Station in a skimpy schoolgirl uniform as the camera zooms in on her taut midsection.
She doesn’t feel like feminism and sexiness are contradictory, but, she admits, there’s also a part of her that feels like “resistance is futile, at this point”.
“I’m not going to keep fighting the image that exists,” she says, a dreary resignation washing across her face.
“I think people, in general, are plebeians that are brainwashed by the type of media that they expose themselves to. … People anticipate a shallowness (from me). They anticipate a self-centredness and a lack of self-awareness.
“It doesn’t … matter what I say, or how eloquent a speaker I may be, or how positive my intentions may be. I’m going to be made into what people desire me to be. At this moment, they might desire to exalt me onto a pedestal. But the next? You’re a human sacrifice. The control is not in my hands.” – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service
