On Mar. 20, Alexandra (Alex) Cooper, host of the incredibly successful Call Her Daddy podcast, released an interview with actress Megan Fox. Fox is no stranger to making headlines after breaking into the acting space with iconic performances in Jennifer’s Body and the Transformers series.
However, Fox is a celebrity that has long been met with criticism and controversy, starting from when she was an up-and-coming actress to having the same microscope on her when she divorced her ex-husband Brian Austin Green and began dating rock star Machine Gun Kelly.
As a long-time personal fan of Fox, I was eager to listen to the episode and was not disappointed by the conversation. She tackled issues such as body image, misogyny, social media, and fame with her dry sense of humor, which she described as “a little niche”.
Cooper began the interview by asking about how Fox grew up, with Fox describing her childhood as being lonely, marked by her mom’s depression and her stepfather’s verbal abuse. Fox spoke about how she felt from a young age that she didn’t fit in and never felt that she could have relationships with people who truly understood her. All of the male attention she received during her early high school years confused her, especially since it came from older men because she’d been struggling with body dysmorphia her entire life.
Megan described how she never felt comfortable in her own body and was transparent with Cooper about which plastic surgeries she’s had done, despite the massive media speculation surrounding the issue.
Despite Fox’s personal insecurities, which she told Cooper candidly that she has, Fox has long been put in a box and labeled as a sex symbol. There’s a portion of the interview where Cooper reads an article that describes her as “a teen boy’s screensaver, and a prop to sell movies”. While Fox revealed that she had never felt strongly about being called a sex symbol, she took the time to explain that she was created to be this sexy character, but she never asked to be. From there, she was torn down by the media and called derogatory names when all she’d ever done was just exist.
She told Cooper, “The things that I thought were my strengths…my mind, my intelligence, or my sense of humor, which is, granted, like very niche sometimes…those things aren’t acknowledged.” This was what hurt her the most about being acknowledged only for her appearance. Fox then continued the conversation to talk about the constant attention she received from the media, and how she felt that in the early part of her career, she was always being “burned at the stake,” making a comparison to a witch hunt. She described the early 2000s as a time that wasn’t kind to many female celebrities and cited Britney Spears as another victim of constant media attention and criticism.
The things that I thought were my strengths, my mind, my intelligence, or my sense of humor, which is granted like very niche sometimes…those things are not acknowledged”
-Megan Fox, Call Her Daddy Podcast
Megan then propelled the conversation to one about the media and how quick it is to bash people online, but how it would obviously never say those same things to anyone’s face in person. Despite the “I don’t care” demeanor that Fox has long been known for, she described how the media’s opinion of her had been something that had bothered her and led her to take a step back from the spotlight for a long time. The constant pressure of never being what the media wanted, while also being on a pedestal one day and being ripped apart the next was not something she was ever able to comprehend, as is the case with many celebrities.
Fox did want to set the record straight that in the time she spent away from the media, she was working to heal and learn from her past experiences. She was open about her therapy journey, as well as explained how she has long been a voracious reader who likes to be educated on a variety of subjects as a way to be more open-minded and become more self-aware.
Fox reflected on some of the lessons she has learned through her experiences in the acting industry and explained that something she has realized now is that she was never “too much” and you should never minimize yourself to make another person comfortable. She recalls the first awards show she was ever invited to, and how her excitement and happiness were perceived as “too much” so she decided to dial down her emotions to be more palatable to the people she was around. She urged listeners to not do that now because, in the end, it is not worth the exhaustion and frustration.
The interview was an incredibly raw and real take on what the other side of fame can look like for a person. Cooper commented that an hour-long conversation should not immediately change people’s perception of Megan Fox, but she has a feeling that it probably will, because the version of her many have created in their head is not the same.
Her interview is an example of how mass media’s perceptions of a person can be incredibly skewed because they’re rooted in a place of ignorance. If these same interviewers had taken the time to ask Fox more meaningful questions instead of being hyper-focused on her body and looks, there would be a very different narrative of her character that would be circling. The interview serves as an example of how easy it is, especially for women, to be torn down and underestimated. Megan ended the interview by discussing how she’s protective of her kids because she doesn’t want them to experience the same level of criticism that she did but hopes that the media has since learned from its mistakes in the past.