The X-rated 2017 role Megan Fox refused to play: “It has very graphic sex scenes”
Having been categorised as a sex symbol from the very beginning of her career, Megan Fox was well within her rights to reject any roles offered her way that would continue to play to that archetype.
Admittedly, the three-time Razzie winner and 11-time nominee has never been celebrated for her thespianism and catalogue of acclaimed, introspective performances that showcased her dramatic chops, but there has been the odd reminder that, with the right material, she’s not as bad as some might think.
The 2021 thriller, Till Death, in which she plays a woman who wakes up handcuffed to her dead husband in a remote cabin and tries to survive against a pair of hitmen sent to finish the job, was the best work of her onscreen career by far, telling Fox’s critics in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t just a pretty face.
On the other hand, following it up with the thunderously crap Bruce Willis vehicle Midnight in the Switchgrass, which earned her another ‘Worst Actress’ nod from the Razzies, wasn’t ideal, but another standout turn in 2024’s Subservience largely went overlooked, mostly because everything apart from her central performance as an increasingly sentient android wasn’t very good.
There’s only so much of being objectified and sexualised that anyone can take, though, and for Fox, that breaking point came after she became a mother. “There are some good projects I’ve read that are with talented people, talented directors,” she explained.
“But the things the women are required to do in the movie are things I can’t have my sons ever know or see.”
Even when prestige television’s ultimate destination came calling, along with the opportunity to collaborate with the creator of one of the greatest TV shows of all time in what would have been her first-ever recurring role in an episodic drama, Fox turned it down without so much as a second’s hesitation.
“I was offered a project on HBO that centres around the life of a prostitute,” the actor revealed in 2016. “And it had very graphic sex scenes, things you would see in a pornographic film, and those are things that are degrading to the woman who’s playing the character.” While she didn’t name names, she didn’t have to, either.
In September 2017, The Wire mastermind David Simon’s The Deuce premiered on HBO, which starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as Eileen Merrell, a sex worker who sees the emerging ‘Golden Age of Porn’ in the early 1970s as the ideal way to make a living in the increasingly legitimate world of pornography, as both a performer and filmmaker.
It’s unlikely that she was offered the lead, with Gyllenhaal on Golden Globe-nominated form in the first season, an acclaimed three-season run on HBO would be a feather in any actor’s cap, but due to the graphic nature of what the character would have required, Fox didn’t think twice about saying no.
