'It brought me in the right direction that put me where I am now.'
Megan Fox has come a long way since starring in Transformers.
ET recently reunited the 33-year-old actress with Diablo Cody -- the screenwriter of Jennifer's Body, which Fox starred in back in 2009 -- where they chatted about their lives since making the cult-horror classic.
When it came time to cast the titular role, Cody had only Fox on her list, thanks in large part to her work in the 2007 flick Transformers.
"You have mystique, which particularly now in this era of social media and people being completely accessible, it's rare. Old movie stars had it.... Many of the actors in your cohort I could not imagine playing Jennifer, they did not have that sort of self-possessed, Eva Gardner-type quality that you have," Cody explained. "And we just knew. We had seen Transformers."
While some actors aren't particularly fond of discussing the roles for which they became famous, Fox insisted that she "actually [doesn't] mind talking about" Transformers.
"I've come full-circle," Fox said. "I've done a total journey with that and made it back to a place where nothing I've experienced is a bad thing, it brought me in the right direction that put me where I am now."
For Cody, the project that she was at one time hesitant to discuss was Jennifer's Body, due to the mixed critical and fan reaction at the time of its release. Like Fox, though, she has since come around on speaking about her most iconic project.
"There was a time when I didn’t like talking about Jennifer’s Body because, you know, that movie was a commercial failure and I was savaged personally. It was hard and I had written about it a lot and I had actually gone through therapy because of that experience," Cody shared. "Now, 10 years later, I genuinely love talking about it... I think part of that is because we are being validated now. The movie has suddenly found its audience."
Similar to Cody, Fox, who called the film "my favorite thing I've ever done," admitted she had a tough time around its release due to both the project's reception and other factors in her life.
"I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just nothing to do. I didn't want to be seen. I didn't want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet," Fox shared. "I didn't want to be seen in public at all because... I believed that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out and being whatever. I didn’t look perfect or I was too fat or too thin. I was stupid or I was offensive. I was a waste of space or a bad actress. Whatever you could think of, I anticipated experiencing that, because my belief system was that the world wasn't going to accept me, so I went through a very dark moment after that."
That mindset has largely changed for Fox now, something she largely credits to being a mom to three sons -- Noah, 6, Bodhi, 5, and Journey, 3 -- with her husband, Brian Austin Green. Though motherhood has certainly positively impacted Fox's personal life, she said that the industry still treats it as "a handicap."
"After I had one of my sons, I had to go do reshoots, I gave birth [and] they called me to do reshoots two weeks afterward. They were like, 'Is she ready to do reshoots?' And I was like, 'No, a person just came out of my vagina, I'm not ready to go do reshoots. What are you talking about?'" Fox recalled. "So they were graceful and gracious and I think I went back, like, four or five weeks later."
"Trying to negotiate into being allowed to go to my trailer to breastfeed my baby was almost impossible... because they don't understand," she continued. "... It's a hostile environment for new mothers or any mothers in general."
In addition to the logistic and physical difficulties that come with being a new mom, Fox also found it hard to be away from her kids for emotional reasons.
"Having to leave to go work all the time... it's hard when you have little kids," Fox said. "Your mind is always somewhere else as well, because your heart is somewhere else. You're always worried about what's going on with them, the guilt of having left them, and are you doing the right thing? And struggling with, 'What do I need to do for me? My creativity, who am I outside of just being a mother,' because that's not my only identity."
"It's very complicated, and people don't give enough credit to people dealing with that because it's not easy," she added. "It weighs on you."
Despite the challenges of motherhood, there are obviously many rewarding moments, one of which came when her son unknowingly honored Jennifer's Body... before expressing his distaste for the flick.
"My son is super creative and so he likes to design clothes and sometimes he wears dresses. He's like a little fashion designer or like a mad painter, like a van Gogh. He's like a crazy maniac for art," she explained. "I don't know why he wanted to be a zombie cheerleader, he came up with that on his own. And when he chose that, I said, 'You know I kind of played a character like that in a movie before.'"
"They really still don't understand what that means... and [that] it isn't real, because they think whatever is happening I actually experienced," Fox continued. "... He wanted to see how she becomes a zombie so I showed him the scene in the woods where they’re going to sacrifice me. And he's so sensitive! I don’t know why I did that. He was hysterical."
Fox revealed that her son still "talks about it now" and "doesn't understand" that she was not actually injured in the making of the film.
"I was like, 'Look at me! I'm right here! I'm laughing, it's OK! That's not mommy! I was pretending. The way you fake cry when you want something. I was faking it,'" Fox explained. "... That scene was intense for me and I forgot where I went with it. And the crying and pain was genuine in that moment. I think he feels that... they're connected to our energy. And so he had a hard time with that."
"I know when he's a little bit older he's going to be a big Jennifer’s Body fan," Fox added. "And I expect [him to dress up] for Halloween at some point in the near future."
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