“All I had to do was apologise”: the movie Megan Fox called the “absolute low point” of her career
Most, if not all of us, have had bosses we didn’t like very much at some point in our careers. The film Horrible Bosses wouldn’t exist if the trope weren’t a true one, but then again, neither would Horrible Bosses 2, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Nevertheless, even if you have a higher-up you hate, the one thing it’s probably not advisable to do, as Megan Fox will tell you, should you ever run into her, is to publicly compare them to Hitler.
The reason you should not do that is because 99% of the time it’s going to be hyperbole to compare your boss to one of world history’s most evil human beings just because they had a go at you for strolling into a meeting 35 minutes late, clutching a Starbucks, but also because doing so could be very, very bad for your career.
Back in 2009, Fox found that out the hard way when she was on the brink of making her third Transformers movie, Dark of the Moon, and gave an interview about being on director Michael Bay’s film set, saying, “He wants to create this insane, infamous madman reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is”.
As you might imagine, this did not go down very well with Bay, who immediately got rid of her (a decision he later said was encouraged by executive producer Steven Spielberg, although he denied this), and replaced her with British model Rosie Huntington-Whitely.
Some time later, Fox spoke to Cosmopolitan about the whole song and dance, saying, “That was absolutely the low point of my career. But without ‘that thing’, I wouldn’t have learned as quickly as I did. All I had to do was apologise, and I refused. I was so self-righteous at 23; I couldn’t see that it was for the greater good. I really thought I was Joan of Arc.”
The irony of making another exaggerated comparison between one person and a historical figure while apologising for doing exactly that aside, Fox may well have a point, because while Transformers: Dark of the Moon was an insanely highly-grossing movie, at the time the fifth biggest in history in fact, it didn’t go down well at all with critics, and Fox that year instead decided to make the much more interesting horror comedy Jennifer’s Body.
Written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame, it starred Fox and Amanda Seyfried and was about a high school student who gets possessed by a demon and starts chomping her way through male students while her nerdy friend tries to stop her. Originally, it was somewhat divisive with critics, who thought Fox had just been cast in order to get more men to watch it, but as the years have gone by, it has assumed a status as something of a cult classic for feminists.
The following year, she made the comic book adaptation Jonah Hex, which flopped, and spent some time out of the spotlight before returning to blockbusters to appear as April O’Neil in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in 2014, and the sequel Out of the Shadows two years later. Her most recent film role was in 2024’s thriller Subservience, although she did voice a toy in last year’s horror sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
