How Megan Fox's Kids Helped Her 'Escape' The Pressures Of Hollywood

Megan Fox has withstood her share of scrutiny and, bluntly put, bold-faced sexism in the industry ever since she rose to global superstardom with 2007's "Transformers." There was a time when every Fox-centric headline focused solely on her looks. Diablo Cody, who wrote Fox's 2009 horror-comedy vehicle, "Jennifer's Body," revealed in a 2019 sitdown that studio executives wanted to sell the film purely on sex alone, undermining the main story about the degradation of a female friendship. When Cody pressed for further explanation, an executive simply emailed her three words, "Megan Fox hot."

Fox's insistence that she had more to offer than just her looks seemingly fell on deaf ears. "I have a pretty amazing personality, and I'm pretty intelligent. Don't just write me off as a pinup," she told Elle in 2009. After taking a respite from acting, during which she gave birth to the youngest of her three children with Brian Austin Green, she triumphantly returned with a much more realized recurring role on the Zooey Deschanel-led sitcom "New Girl." In a June 30 interview with The Washington Post, Fox revealed that her dryly witty character, Reagan, most resembled her. Fox observed, "People were surprised that I was funny at all." Additionally, she told the outlet, "I've always been surprised by how easy it was for people to overlook that I'm relatively intelligent." 

How did the actor cope with all these prejudgments people made over the years? As it turns out, her children helped — find out how, next!

For Megan Fox, her three sons with ex-husband Brian Austin Green — Noah (born in 2012), Bodhi (2014), and Journey (2016) — could not have arrived at a better time in her life, per The Washington Post. According to Fox, Noah came just when she felt "so lost and trying to understand how am I supposed to feel value or find purpose in this horrendous, patriarchal, misogynistic hell that was Hollywood at the time." Reminiscing about how the public saw her as "a shallow succubus... for at least the first decade of my career," Fox maintains her children, her "fertile soil," provided "the ground that I needed to grow into something quite special." As she noted, "That kind of saved me honestly. I needed an escape."

Fox also credits her romance with Machine Gun Kelly for helping her gain back the confidence in which Hollywood once put a dent. As Fox gushed to The Washington Post, "The first time I looked into his eyes, I was like . . . 'I have known you so many times,'" adding that she did not expect the rocker to feel like "my soul mate, instantly." 

In addition to July's "Till Death," Fox is significantly more at home with this year's other roles in "Midnight in the Switchgrass" and "Big Gold Brick." After spending years "sort of checked out from Hollywood," Fox said, "Now I'm ready to grow into myself." We certainly cannot wait to see what "Megan Fox: Part II" has in store!