Meet Megan Fox in passing, as I did at the GQ shoot, and you may be left with no deeper impression than the one she made on me: a quiet, self-contained girl standing barefoot above Bel Air, her sky-blue robe flapping open to reveal a cutaway swimsuit and a taut, tanned body.

Megan is beautiful. No kidding. She’s beautiful in the same way that Bill Gates is wealthy and Barack Obama influential. She is 23 years old, 5′5″, curvy as a canyon road and slender as your chances, with long, dark hair, penetrating blue eyes and a full mouth that, when the mood takes her, flashes a smile as wide as a movie screen. In short, as I e-mailed the Editor of this magazine from the set: “Hubba hubba.” That’s the kind of talk that fancies itself worldly and ironic and hard-bitten but that Megan – who’s heard it all before, of course – might correctly identify as “sophomoric”. She used that term later, to dismiss the oeuvre of the comedy writer-director Judd Apatow, and by that stage of our acquaintance I wasn’t at all surprised. One-on-one, Megan is disarmingly forthright. But on the shoot she was a closed book. Attractively jacketed, certainly, but closed. Between each setup she shrugged on her robe and retreated to the comfort of her iPhone.

Our first conversation did not go well. I asked her about arrangements for our meeting the following day. Pressed for a suggestion of what she’d like to do, she wondered if I’d enjoy a game of Lord Of The Rings Trivial Pursuit. The correct answer to this was, clearly, “Yes.” But suddenly I felt old, and foolish.

“I wouldn’t know any of the answers,” I said. “It wouldn’t be much fun for you. Like playing tennis against a man with no arms.” Like what? I had to repeat the stupid, tactless remark. She didn’t laugh. For a dreadful second, I worried she might have an armless loved-one. How to rescue the situation? Could we play a different game? Harry Potter Cluedo? Narnia Monopoly? (Twister? No, I didn’t say Twister.)

It was too late. The moment had gone. Instead of quizzing each other on our knowledge of Middle Earth, we would have lunch. No games would be played. I had only myself to blame, but I was prepared for our interview to be a struggle.

All of which only goes to show how wrong a first impression can be. The next day, trailed by car-loads of paparazzi, Megan drove her white Mercedes 4×4 from her house in the hills to my hotel, the Sunset Marquis, in West Hollywood. We sat in the garden and talked – and talked, and talked. Initially, it was difficult to square this breathless conversationalist with the guarded glamourpuss from the shoot. Simon Pegg, who starred with Megan in the 2008 comedy How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, experienced a similar confusion after working with her for a short time. “I remember the first time we had a drink and chatted for a while,” Pegg says. “She absolutely floored me because whereas before there’d been this quiet wallflower who got nervous about doing scenes, suddenly there was this extraordinary, outspoken, complex, smart, experienced person. She’s a contradiction, I think. Continue reading ‘Megan Fox will not be censored’

Megan Fox won’t kick her horse.

She’s just sort of tapping it, using her Ugg-booted right foot to give it a nudge with her heel. But to Bandit (that’s the horse), this is more of a suggestion, and what this horse needs right now is acommand,a firm whack on the undercarriage with both heels that says “Stop screwing off!” — and this Fox is either unwilling or unable to give.

So we’re gonna pause here for a minute or two, just a few hundred feet up the Topanga Canyon horse trail we’re ascending, until Bandit can behave.

It’s sunny but still mild for L. A., so Fox is wearing an open yellow cardigan over her black tank top. Her jeans, waist-baring low-riders, were rolled up just beyond her calves until Michael (our serene and tan guide for the day) mentioned she might want to roll them back down to avoid “chafing” — the kind of advice you don’t ignore.

She’s got a self-professed weakness for eye makeup, but she’s not wearing much now, just a little mascara. Today’s look is all-natural — though liberal cleavage and the “Brian” hip tattoo that occasionally peeks out above the waistband of her black underwear prevent it from being remotely wholesome.

“If you’re a real wimp with him,” Michael is explaining, “he’s gonna keep taking advantage of you.” Dominance over horses is established in the first ten minutes of the ride, which means Fox has about one minute left to show Bandit who’s boss. “Don’t worry, there’s no way you’re gonna hurt him,” Michael says. Definitely not with the little love kicks she keeps delivering.

It’s hard to hold this unwillingness to kick Bandit against her, because it is, after all, kicking an animal, but also because she’s clearly freaked out — “terrified” is how she puts it — being in the saddle for the first time. “I have a healthy fear of horses,” she said when she was introduced to Bandit, and considering he’s a thousand-pound brown beast and she’s a five-four, hundred-pound twenty-two-year-old actress, this was odd only because the riding lesson was her idea. She wanted to learn, she said, but really she just wanted an escape.

“You are catching me at a really vulnerable point in my life,” she says, alluding to the recent breakup with her boyfriend of four and a half years. She’s moving out of their home and being chased by an ever-growing pack of camera-wielding bruisers as she tries to get her personal life under control. “I’ve never really lived as an adult by myself. Like, I’ve never even bought my own dishes.” That’s all about to change. So yeah, Fox is spooked, and Bandit isn’t really helping. Continue reading ‘Good Morning, Megan Fox’

Megan Fox breezes into a West Hollywood nail salon 20 minutes late, with a gait that is vaguely feline and an expression that is not particularly apologetic. “Sorry, there were 20 paps on me,” she says, pulling off a pair of aviators and flicking back a whip-straight strand of dark hair. “They were parked outside my house this morning. I tried to lose them, but they’re out back.” (A peek out the window confirms that the paparazzi currently have this place surrounded.)

If you haven’t picked up a tabloid in six months and aren’t a men’s magazine reader, you may well be wondering, Who the hell is Megan Fox? You can bet your boyfriend—and your brother, your dad, and the guy who rotates your tires—is already in the know. To borrow a line from the cover of Maxim, Fox is simply “Earth’s Hottest Girl.” Yes, she appeared as a self-obsessed starlet in last year’s little-seen How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. Mostly, though, she owes this distinction to the 2007 blockbusterTransformers, in which her tanned, taut midsection costarred with Shia LaBeouf and a muscle-car- turned-monster robot. Ka-ching! A pinup was born.

Fox’s looks may be lethal—but her mouth? It’s a nuclear reactor. At 23, she possesses a vocabulary that could make Howard Stern blush and a complete inability to toe the line with standard starlet small talk. She regularly, and somewhat randomly, pokes fun at Zac Efron for being a cog in Disney’s mega-conglomerate wheel— but also jokes that they’re the same person. She has bragged about a past dalliance with a stripper named Nikita. She declares, with some vehemence, that men who believe that women shouldn’t curse can “go suck a dick.” (For the record, these expletive-laden rants come across more abrasively in print than they do in person.) At the Golden Globes, Fox, poured glamorously into a beaded gold gown, babbled to an E! reporter: “I’m pretty sure I’m a doppelgänger for Alan Alda. I’m a trannie, I’m a man. No, I’m so painfully insecure, like I’m on the verge of vomiting…”

Hawkeye? More like Angelina Jolie, with whom she shares a built-in sex bomb aesthetic, a taste for body art (Fox has acquired eight tattoos in five years, including a sizable Marilyn Monroe on her right forearm), and a certain ballsy, nouveau–Annie Oakley bravado: Anything they can do, I can do better! Continue reading ‘ELLE’s June cover girl on breaking up, misbehaving, and having men eating out of her hand’

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