UPDATE (6/23/20, 5:24 p.m. ET): No bad blood here. After Megan Fox clarified that she was neither underage nor “undressed” during her audition for Transformers, director Michael Bay shared the actress’s statement in an Instagram post. He also added a screenshot from Megan’s audition tape for Transformers, and made sure to point out that she was not washing his car amid the process, contrary to recent rumors.
“Megan Fox wrote this today. This is a still from her Audition taping 13 years ago. No. She is not washing a car nor in a bikini like the press have falsely said for many years. And I personally think Megan is fantastic. I’m proud to have worked with her, and still am planning on working with her,” the director wrote in the post’s caption on June 23.
ORIGINAL: Megan Fox is setting the record straight about what really went down between herself and Michael Bay when she auditioned for Transformers at just 19 years old. Her decision to share the story came after one of the actress’s 2009 interviews with Jimmy Kimmel, which was about her experience as a teenager in the entertainment industry, went viral on June 20. During the throwback interview, Megan opened up about starring as an extra in Bay’s film, Bad Boys II, when she was just 15.
https://twitter.com/reservoird0gs/status/1274538711175356417
“They were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in and I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and six inch heels,” Megan explained in the interview. “[Bay] approved it, and they said, ‘Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar. She can’t have a drink in her hand.’ And his solution to that problem was to have me dancing underneath the waterfall and getting soaking wet. I’m 15. I was in 10th grade. That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s brain works.”
After this interview was brought to light, fans also brought up another story involving Megan and Michael Bay. Also in 2009, a film critic for The Guardian claimed that Megan told him that Bay made her visit his house and “wash his Ferrari while he filmed her” when she auditioned for another one of his movies, Transformers. In Megan’s statement, she denied that this ever took place.
Megan made a point to note that, by the time she auditioned for Transformers, she was 19 or 20 years old (not 15 like she was in Bad Boys II). “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,” she explained. “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 as far as this particular audition story, I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to ‘wash’ or work one someone’s cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script.”
Still, Megan made it clear that there are plenty of other issues that she has with the movie industry. “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,” she said. However, she did not specify who these specific instances involved.
To conclude her message, Megan wrote, “When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and even Steven [Spielberg] for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.” She also thanked her fans for their support and praised those who have spoken up about this “violent and toxic societal paradigm.”
Megan’s reference to Spielberg stems from an interview that Bay did about the actress eventually being replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the Transformers franchise. Bay claimed that it was Steven who asked for Megan to be fired from the Transformer movies, which he executive-produced. Spielberg has denied ever requesting this.