Megan Fox has addressed a recently resurfaced interview clip from 2009, which has sparked widespread calls for apologies from Michael Bay, Jimmy Kimmel, and the broader entertainment industry for its treatment of the actress and her career.
During an appearance on Kimmel, Fox described her experience as an extra on the set of Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II when she was 15 years old. She said that when Bay realized she couldn’t be seated at the bar or appear to be drinking alcohol due to her age, “His solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath the waterfall getting soaking wet.”
“At 15, I was in 10th grade,” Fox told Kimmel. “So that's sort of a microcosm of how Bay's mind works.” The host’s response? “That’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work.” The audience laughed.
As the clip has spread online, fans have called on both Bay and the comedian to apologize. On Monday night, Fox said that despite fans’ concerns, she was not “preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.”
In an Instagram post, Fox wrote, “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. At least not where it’s currently being projected.”
“I was around 15 or 16 years old when I was an extra in Bad Boys II,” Fox continued. “There are multiple interviews where I shared the anecdote of being chosen for the scene and the conversations that took place surrounding it. It’s important to note however that when I auditioned for Transformers I was 19 or 20.”
Discussion surrounding Fox’s Kimmel interview also reminded many on social media of an infamous Transformers audition story—that Bay had Fox wash his Ferrari to land the role. Jason Solomons wrote in The Guardian in 2009 that Fox told him “she went to director Michael Bay’s house to audition and he made her wash his Ferrari while he filmed her. She said she didn’t know what had happened to that footage. When I put it to Bay himself, he looked suitably abashed. ‘Er, I don’t know where it is either.’”
Fox denied that this was the case in her statement.
“I did ‘work’ (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael’s Ferrari’s during one of the audition scenes,” Fox wrote. “It was at the Platinum Dunes studio parking lot, there were several other crew members and employees present and I was at no point undressed or anything similar.”
“So 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,” Fox continued. “I hope that whatever opinions are formed around these episodes will at least be seeded in the facts of the events.”
Fox thanked fans for their support, but added, “these specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly 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.”
Representatives for Kimmel and Bay did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.