Megan Fox is opening up about the highs and lows of her Hollywood career.

The Transformers actress is the face of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2023, and she’s taking the opportunity to get into the nitty gritty of her place in Tinsel Town. In an interview published Monday, the 37-year-old got candid about being a woman in Hollywood, sharing that her “favorite project” to date is 2009’s Jennifer’s Body — a film in which she played a possessed teen who fed on her male classmates — because it  “aligned” with a rough period of her personal life. She shared:
“There’s just something about the timing of that and how it aligned with my public crucifixion I was going through and my internal psychological breakdown. What the character was going through was very much a metaphor for what I was going through in Hollywood, and with media, and with the world at large.”
If you don’t remember, Fox came out against director Michael Bay in 2009, recalling on Jimmy Kimmel Live! at the time that in his 2003 picture, Bad Boys II, she was sexualized on set at just 15 years old. She shared that during production, she was dressed in a bikini and instructed to dance “underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet” — something she described as “a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.” Back then, before the #MeToo era, her comments received backlash from industry members and fans alike, but now, she’s come to terms with how things played out. She explained in her Sports Illustrated interview:
“I was ahead of the #MeToo movement just in terms of timing because I was coming out and talking about these things maybe a decade before. I think that at the time I didn’t handle it well because when you believe or you know that you’re on the right side of the universe, and you know that what you’re doing or what you’re saying is true and genuine and correct, and should be heard, but it’s not heard, and beyond not being heard, you’re ridiculed for it — I’m fully okay now with people being upset and I don’t f**king care because if you’re not upset, what happens is I’m broken because you’ve taken every last bit of me, and for what?”

She added of the reaction women often face in Hollywood in comparison to their male counterparts:

“As soon as you push, yeah, you’re a bitch. But if you don’t push, you’ll never get what you need, so it’s a lose-lose situation, and I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not giving my life away to people who don’t appreciate it.”
What a tough burden for women in the industry to sadly be faced with… But thanks to people like Megan, it’s being tolerated less and less!

Elsewhere in the interview, the Till Death actress shared that she’s never really “loved” her body. She vulnerably shared:
“I have body dysmorphia. I don’t ever see myself the way other people see me. There is never a point in my life where I loved my body, ever ever.”

She explained that when she was little, she had an “obsession” with how she “should” look, but is now on a “never ending” journey of loving herself.