A Jimmy Kimmel interview from 2009 has gone viral on Twitter because the internet is finally seeing how Hollywood failed Megan Fox.
The clip, which resurfaced on Twitter, shows Megan Fox (23 at the time) telling a story about her time working with Michael Bay.
“The first time I ever worked with [Bay], actually, I had just turned 15 and I was an extra in Bad Boys II. They were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in, and I was wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and, like, six-inch heels. He approved it, and 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. At 15, I was in 10th grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works,” she told Kimmel.
But despite speaking out against a wildly inappropriate situation she was put in, Fox then faced laughter from the crowd before Jimmy Kimmel proceeded to make inappropriate jokes. The whole clip is really *not* it.
“Clip from 2009 where megan fox tells a story about michael bay sexualising her as a 15 y/o,” the tweet read.
“The crowd laughs, and kimmel makes gross joked. Teen girls being preyed on by older men has never been taken seriously and still isn’t.”
But the now-viral clip has prompted the internet to take a good hard look at all the times Megan Fox was failed by Hollywood, and honestly, it’s easy to forget just how much shit this woman has been put through in her life.
In addition to her experience during Bad Boys II, she was also infamously asked to wash Bay’s car as part of her audition for Transformers while he filmed her.
After calling out the Transformers director for being a “tyrant” on set, Bay allegedly enlisted the help of other members of the crew to smear Fox’s name, calling her a “porn star” and an “unfriendly bitch” among other things.
“When facing the press, Megan is the queen of talking trailer trash and posing like a porn star. And yes we’ve had the unbearable time of watching her try to act on set, and yes, it’s very cringe-able. So maybe, being a porn star in the future might be a good career option. But make-up beware, she has a paragraph tattooed to her backside (probably due her rotten childhood)—easily another 45 minutes in the chair!” the letter read.
Following the ordeal, she was sacked from the movie and replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, resulting her essentially being blacklisted from Hollywood.
She knew it was wrong at the time and she called it out well before the #MeToo movement began. But while we’re slowly getting better at believing victims (although we’ve far from perfect), back in the early noughties, calling out this behaviour had a detrimental impact on Fox’s career.
I was today years old when I found out Michael Bay & team publicly called Megan Fox a “trailer trash pornstar” for speaking out against his sexual harassment on HER WHEN SHE WAS 15 and that’s why the media painted her the way they did for years….. fuck everyone. https://t.co/GUyJL6X7mY
— elijah daniel (@elijahdaniel) June 22, 2020
But unsurprisingly, the hyper-sexualisation of literal child Megan Fox wasn’t exclusively a Michael Bay issue, with fans quickly pointing out the countless other times she was cast in highly inappropriate roles.
For example, take a look at this scene from a season one episode of Two And A Half Men. The episode aired in January 2004, which means she wasn’t even 18 when it hit our screens, let alone when it was filmed.
“Megan fox apart from being sexualized by michael bay as a kid she also appeared in a episode of two and a half men as a 16 y/o girl who was too sexy for her age and both alan and charlie sheen’s character wanted to have sex with her,” another tweet read.
“I’m absolutely disgusted. But in addition to pointing out all the horrible stuff that our queen was subject to in her youth, fans were also quick to praise her for some of her most iconic roles, including Jennifer’s Body.”
She really was a victim of the entertainment industry.
Two things: Megan Fox was a victim of an industry that took advantage of her, and what Michael Bay did was disgusting. She deserved better.
Also, she was goddamn brilliant in Jennifer’s Body, a film that deserves a second chance. pic.twitter.com/ipefEtjB4o
— In the Mouth of Mattness (@MattKonopkaKHC) June 21, 2020
To put it simply, Megan Fox was treated like a piece of meat just because she happens to be conventionally “sexy.” But in addition to her looks, she’s a talented actress and a feminist icon who deserves our respect and admiration.
https://twitter.com/bithebitch/status/1274999372636356608
Megan Fox is a feminist icon and deserves to be taken seriously as an actress and as a woman.
