The year was 2009. Kevin Rudd was still PM, climate change was still somewhat manageable, and Hollywood crapped out the incoherent mess that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Awful doesn’t begin to describe the film but it did give the world Megan Fox, who quickly became the hottest person and topic in Hollywood. But as quickly as she rose up to every “hottest woman” list in Tinseltown, she dropped off the radar even quicker.
So what exactly happened that caused Megan to lose all that buzz she had going for her in 2009? Well, the answer starts with Michael Bay, moves onto Hitler, and ends with Steven Spielberg.
After Revenge of the Fallen came out, Megan gave a now-notorious interview with Wonderland magazine where she spilled tea all over the place by comparing her experience of working with Bay to Hitler and Napoleon, as well as how his direction basically consisted of him telling her to “be hot.”
“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.”
There’s nothing wrong with calling out questionable behaviour from a director on a movie set, especially one with a dodgy history of sexist behaviour like Michael Bay. But there is definitely something wrong with how she went about it. She could’ve brought up literally any other comparison to hold Bay accountable and yet she just had to go with Hitler.
Okay, so Megan’s Hitler comment was in poor taste but her comments about Bay and calling out his behaviour remain valid. But rather than having people flock to her side in support, no one made a whisper.
Not only did she evoke Godwin’s law, Hollywood is primarily run by Jewish people so bringing up the toothbrush mustachioed dictator is like taking a dump on the Mona Lisa while Da Vinci is watching.
Steven Spielberg – who is basically Hollywood’s most powerful director, an executive producer on the Transformers movies, and most importantly for this whole saga, Jewish – supposedly later caught wind of Megan’s comments and basically put the nail in the coffin in her career by basically blacklisting her from Hollywood.
According to Bay in an interview with GQ, Spielberg urged him to “fire [Megan] right now”, hence why she doesn’t appear in the third Transformers movie. As a bonus, he also gave a pretty gross non-apology for his behaviour when directing her on Revenge of the Fallen.
“I wasn’t hurt, because I know that’s just Megan. Megan loves to get a response. And she does it in kind of the wrong way. I’m sorry, Megan. I’m sorry I made you work twelve hours. I’m sorry that I’m making you show up on time. Movies are not always warm and fuzzy.”
Everything gets a bit fuzzy at this point due to conflicting versions of what went down after Megan’s Hitler comment and Bay’s response. Spielberg denied telling Bay to fire Megan while her reps issued a statement saying that it was her choice to leave the Transformers franchise.
We’ll probably never know what actually happened and whether Spielberg actually did blacklist Megan from Hollywood. What we do know is that there was a heap of slanderous things allegedly said in the press about her by Bay’s Transformers crew and her career took a dramatic nosedive.
After 2009, Megan’s resume went from high profile blockbusters to small indies and she suddenly fell off all the “hottest women” lists as quickly as she arrived. Looking back on it in 2017, Megan called that period the “low point of [her] career“, though I’d argue that her career floor will forever remain the Transformers movies.
Her career eventually revived a bit by 2014 as she and Bay eventually put their spat behind them and teamed up again for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot movies, as well as a well-received recurring part on the TV sitcom New Girl.
But the damage has already been done to her career and it was all because she spoke out about the dodgy stuff she experienced in Hollywood. Even now with the #MeToo movement underway, Megan still carries the stench of what went down 10 years ago and is reluctant to share her stories as she did before, telling The New York Times:
“I don’t know that I want to feel anything about it because my words were taken and used against me in a way that was — at that time in my life, at that age and dealing with that level of fame — really painful.
“I don’t want to say this about myself, but let’s say that I was ahead of my time and so people weren’t able to understand. Instead, I was rejected because of qualities that are now being praised in other women coming forward.”
It’s quite disheartening to see someone who was originally as outspoken as Megan become so reluctant to speak out due to the muzzle Hollywood forced on her. It’s time we remember what went down in 2009 and never forget all the unwarranted blame she had to shoulder when she tried to do the right thing.