Megan Fox is GLAMOUR’s April cover star: ‘Me just being free and having fun with how I am is very provocative for people’

While Megan has since reconciled with Bay – and worked with him again in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise – she’s continued to speak out about her experiences of misogyny in general, before suffering a “psychological breakdown” and retreating from the limelight due to the wide-scale objectification from the media, industry and the internet.

“I wasn’t allowed to be a human, because I was a topic of conversation and gossip and punch lines,” she tells me.

While she still accepted a few roles, her public appearances dried up, “I was essentially in hiding for several years of my life” she says. But now she’s reemerged in a post-#MeToo landscape, her status and career revised and reevaluated, and heralded as a feminist icon – although, as she tells me, not by everybody.

And this – I believe – is the most interesting and important reason Megan Fox is having a moment right now.

We meet in a photography studio in Burbank, Los Angeles, on a sunny spring Sunday on the morning of the GLAMOUR cover shoot. Megan drives herself to set (she doesn’t like sitting in the back of cars) in her custom Range Rover, having spent the first half of the morning tending to weekend activities with her three children, Noah, nine, Bodhi, eight, and Journey, five, who she shares with her ex-husband, OG Beverly Hills 90210 actor, Brian Austin Green.

She is a petite 5ft 4in and is dressed entirely in pink, from a baseball cap to tracksuit to Louis Vuitton handbag, arriving with a small entourage including her close friend, the Hollywood super-stylist, Maeve Reilly (who also works with Hailey Bieber and the Kardashians), who styled this fantastical cover shoot. 

From the off, Megan is friendly, easy-going and fun, making everyone feel at ease as she orders gluten-free toast with jam for breakfast. During the course of our hour-long conversation, she is warm and delivers unfettered honesty, which at one point leads to her breaking down in tears as she opens up about a particularly sensitive issue surrounding her eldest child, Noah. The emotion is raw and she leaves everyone in the room moved (more on this later.) 

As she acknowledges at the end of the interview, hers is undoubtedly one of the most ‘unfiltered’ of all GLAMOUR’s Unfiltered interviews to date, joking afterwards, “You might need to actually filter it!”

I start by asking her why she thinks her career – which has included recent thrillers Midnight In The Switchgrass (where she met Machine Gun Kelly), Till Death and Johnny & Clyde, dark comedies Big Gold Brick and Good Mourning (written and directed by her fiancé) and forthcoming action film The Expendables 4 – is having a renaissance right now?

“I think the first time around, when I was dealing with astronomical levels of fame, that in itself is a type of trauma… And if you don’t have a big family or a big support system, it’s easy to become very overwhelmed or get lost in that,” she says. “And if you’re delicate at all, it’s a hard thing to go through. So, I shut down a lot and retreated from everything… I’m so much better equipped now to deal with it and to experience it in a way where I can actually enjoy some of it and not be so self-conscious and afraid all the time.”