Behind-the-scenes battle. Megan Fox revealed she’s struggled with body dysmorphia from a very young age.
“I don’t ever see myself the way other people see me,” the Transformers star, 37, said in a cover story interview for Sports Illustrated’s 2023 swimsuit edition — as she is one of this year’s four cover stars alongside Martha Stewart, Kim Petras and Brooks Nader. “There is never a point in my life where I loved my body, never, ever.”
Fox went on to add that she had an “awareness” of her body ever since she was a little girl, causing her to obsess over fitting a certain body image. “It definitely wasn’t environmental because I grew up in a very religious environment where bodies weren’t even, like, acknowledged,” she stated in a video shared via the publication’s YouTube page on Monday, May 15. “The journey of, like, loving myself is gonna be never-ending, I think.”
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles star previously spoke out about her body dysmorphia struggles. “I have a lot of deep insecurities,” she told British GQ Style in an October 2021 joint interview with then-boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly.
She continued: “I think I had either put myself in, or allowed other people to put me in, this weird box that didn’t quite fit me, where I hadn’t lived my own life as myself for a really long time — the parts of me that were always eccentric or strange and didn’t belong within my own family unit or within Hollywood.”
Fox’s career skyrocketed with the 2009 horor-comedy Jennifer’s Body, in which she plays a high school teen who goes on a killing spree after being possessed by a demon. Years later, the actress — who shares sons Noah, 10, Bodhi, 9, and Journey, 6, with her ex-husband, Brian Austin Green — revealed that the newfound attention the film brought her made for a “very dark” time in her life.
“I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just nothing to do,” Fox told Entertainment Tonight in September 2019. “I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet, I didn’t want to be seen in public at all because the fear, and the belief, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out.”
In addition to being sexualized by “every producer” she worked with, the New Girl alum noted that she felt excluded from the entertainment industry’s feminist community, even during the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017.
“What is supporting other females if there is only certain ones of us we support?” she added at the time. “If I have to be an academic or have to be non-threatening to you in some way? Why can’t I be a part of the group as well?”
Becoming pregnant was the “first real breakthrough” that helped her overcome those feelings. “My mind opened up and I was able to see from a birds-eye view and breath and take it in,” Fox continued. “And then another kid, and then another kid and with every kid I feel like that’s always been the doorway into a better version of myself.”
Fox and Green, 49, tied the knot in 2010 and welcomed their first child, Noah, two years later. One year after the Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen star gave birth to son Bodhi in 2014, she and the Beverly Hills, 90210 alum called it quits after 11 years together. The two reconciled amid news of Fox’ third pregnancy in 2016, though the split again four years later and finalized their divorce in February 2022.
Fox went on to get engaged to Machine Gun Kelly (real name Colson Barker) in January 2022. Green, for his part, welcomed son Zane, 10 months, with Dancing With the Stars’ Sharna Burgess that June.
