Megan Fox Once Confused Her Serious Mental Health Troubles for Method Acting
Megan Fox was once desperate to prove her worth in Hollywood, even though she felt grossly mistreated by the film industry. But her desperation led to a downward spiral that was difficult to recover from.
Megan Fox convinced herself that she was only ‘depressed’ because of method acting
Fox’s past success was a bit of a catch-22. She was enjoying massive attention from both audiences and her contemporaries. But she didn’t feel too respected as an actor. Earlier in her career, Fox felt her looks were being prioritized over her skill. And she tried to overcompensate to defend herself against the criticism.
“Really my only job is to look attractive,” Fox once said in an interview with GQ. “I was so angry about that, that I went in the opposite direction. I turned into a really butch bull dyke for, like, six months. I would dress as a boy, in giant oversized clothes and skate shoes. I was not taking care of myself, smoking two packs a day. Then I went in the other direction. From being a giant motorcycle-riding lesbian, I turned into a zombie. I lost, like, 30lbs.”
But this backfired on Fox. Soon, the Transformers actor realized that what she was doing was really a cry for help.
“I was like, ‘I’m losing weight for the movie,'” Fox added. “I was telling myself I was being Method, which was so outrageous and ridiculous and not true. But I ended up getting sick and my hair started falling out and I was like, ‘Oh, f***. I can’t do this.'”
Fox also clarified how she ended up losing her hair during the process.
“You lose too much weight, you’re not getting your vitamins, you get sick. I was really skinny. I was depressed,” she said.
Megan Fox believed perception of her image changed in hindsight
Fox confided that her treatment in the spotlight started to get under her skin. In an interview she did with Refinery 29, she shared that she started questioning her own acting skills. But doing so only upset her even more.
“I started getting really angry,” she said. “I was like, F*** that, why did I live for a decade thinking that I was shit at something when I was actually pretty decent at it? That led to this realization that I’d been in a self-imposed prison for so much of my life.”
But over the years, Fox felt that audiences were beginning to appreciate the actor more. She started believing that she wasn’t seen as the shallow diva some painted her as earlier in her career.
“I think there has been a pervasive perception of me as a shallow succubus, if that makes any sense, for at least the first decade of my career,” Fox said in a resurfaced interview with The Washington Post. “And then that started to change more recently as people revisited some of my interviews, listened to me speak and started to see me in a different way.”
Megan Fox isn’t sure she’d have control over her image if she debuted in the film industry today
Nowadays, stars have certain advantages that Fox didn’t have back when she first entered the scene. Social media has given celebrities more of a voice than ever before. But in the grand scheme of things, she doubted access to social media would’ve made a difference.
“They can put their own narrative out on their own pages, which I didn’t have. But outside of your own social media , today still, it does lie in the hands of the journalists. If we go back through my Rolling Stone interviews and anything I did for Vanity Fair — any of these big publications — I was always an eloquent speaker, I was always a thoughtful person, I had things to say,” she said. “I wasn’t shallow, I wasn’t vapid, I wasn’t vain, I was none of those things, and still the image was manipulated by the people who were putting out the soundbites. To a degree, that’s still the same.”
