Culture

This Resurfaced Jimmy Kimmel Interview Is The Perfect Example Of How Hollywood Failed Megan Fox

"That single nod she did after his 'joke' was the exact moment she realised all men are the same."

by Michelle Rennex  23 June 2020
megan fox jimmy kimmel

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People are furious over a resurfaced interview from 2009, where Jimmy Kimmel laughs at Megan Fox after she told a story about how Michael Bay sexualised her on film when she was just 15-years-old.

The disturbing clip went viral over the weekend, when @reservoird0gs shared the interview to Twitter with the caption: “Teen girls being preyed on by older men has never been taken seriously and still isn’t.”

In the interview, Megan Fox recounts the first time she worked with Michael Bay as an extra in Bad Boys II. Then aged 15, Fox explained that she was made to wear a stars-and-stripes bikini, red cowboy hat and six-inch heels while filming a club scene.

“[Bay] approved it, and they said, ‘you know, Michael, she’s 15 so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand’. So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet,” Fox continued. “At 15, I was in 10th grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”

In response, Jimmy Kimmel chuckled that it was “perfectly wholesome” as the crowd laughed along. Continuing on, Kimmel then said “it’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend they don’t exist.”

Naturally, Megan Fox’s defeated response was: “Oh, okay. Right.”

As soon as the clip resurfaced, people quickly criticised Jimmy Kimmel for his inappropriate response to a story about the hyper-sexualisation of a literal child. Some even went so far as to call Kimmel’s response to Fox’s story “even worse” than Michael Bay’s actions.

But this toxic reaction to Megan Fox’s claims were nothing new. After Megan spoke out about Michael Bay, who also made her audition for Transformers by filming her washing his Ferrari, the Transformers director allegedly made an effort to blacklist her from the industry.

Despite Transformers being a breakout role for Fox, Bay fired Megan from the series two films in after she called him a “nightmare” to work for and compared him to Hitler on set. In response, Bay labelled Fox “difficult” and allowed anonymous crew to call her “trailer trash”, a “porn star” and an “unfriendly bitch” through an open letter on his website.

These claims quickly derailed Megan Fox’s expected career progression, with her only real big role since Transformers being the very good film, Jennifer’s Body. While Michael Bay claimed that Megan was simply too difficult to work with, her co-star Shia LaBeouf believed that it was Megan’s “women-empowerment [stuff that] made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael, who some people think is a very lascivious filmmaker”.

“Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality. It’s summer. It’s Michael’s style,” LaBeouf continued. “And I think [Fox] never got comfortable with it. This is a girl who was taken from complete obscurity and placed in a sex-driven role in front of the whole world and told she was the sexiest woman in America. And she had a hard time accepting it.”

Despite being the “sexiest woman in American”, Megan Fox is still allowed to feel uncomfortable at the hyper-sexualised situations she was put in. But sadly this all happened around 2009, eight years prior to the #MeToo movement kicked off. As a result, Fox deciding to speak out against high-profile Hollywood giants like Michael Bay just worked against her, essentially destroying her career.

But thanks to this resurfaced clip, people are now demanding justice for Megan Fox and are loudly condemning Michael Bay, Jimmy Kimmel, and more broadly, Hollywood, for their “disgusting” treatment and sexualisation of the actress.

Update: 23/6/20 

Megan Fox has since released a statement on her Instagram page regarding the viral video of her 2009 interview with Jimmy Kimmel.

While taking a moment to thank fans for their support, she used the opportunity to clear up any misconceptions people may have about her treatment in the industry, particularly regarding her Transformers auditions.

“While I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support, I do feel I need to clarify some of the details as they have been lost in the retelling of the events and cast a sinister shadow that doesn’t really, in my opinion, belong,” Fox wrote. “I was around 15 or 16 years old when I was an extra in Bad Boys II [but] it’s important to note, however, that when I auditioned for Transformers I was 19 or 20.”

View this post on Instagram

May we all continue waking up❤️

A post shared by Megan Fox (@meganfox) on

Continuing on, Fox then discussed her Transformers audition scene, where she confirmed that she did “work” on one of Michael Bay’s Ferraris. However, Megan noted that it happened on a studio parking lot with crew and employees present.

“I was at no point undressed or anything similar,” Fox cleared up. “So as far as this particular audition story, I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to ‘wash’ or work on someone’s cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script.”

Going on to defend Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, Megan shared that her experiences with these men were “inconsequential in a long and arduous journey” where she endured some “genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthless misogynistic industry.”

“There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now, but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart,” she concluded. “But when it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.”