Megan Fox is relative newbie to the Hollywood big screen having only starred in a number television series and a handful of walk-away roles in some films. Most recently she was on the ill-fated Hope & Faith from ABC before landing the role of Mikaela Banes in the summer blockbuster Transformers.

Fox?s role in Transformers isn?t the typical Michael Bay female lead ? a milquetoast beautiful character that rides the coat tails of sometimes numerous male counterparts. The director instead has Banes as a powerful female who does her fair share of butt kicking. ?I think the writers wrote [Banes] as a very respectable female character,? Fox says. ?She was strong, she was different and she was relatable in all of these things. It wasn?t me because the writers did a good job.?

Much has been written about having Bay as a director ? that he yells and is very combative, even abusive, to actors on the set. Yet, Fox never experienced anything like that on the set of Transformers. ?He pushed me but he had to and not in a negative way,? she says. ?He pushed me to be tough and really do some of that action that maybe I wasn’t prepared to do. I needed that.?

It was something that she wasn?t afraid of after a long audition process where she not only had to convince Bay she was right for the job but Steven Spielberg as well. ?I had like eight different meetings over the span of a month or month and a half,? Fox says. ?There are a lot of other people you have to convince as well. It’s not even just those two, it’s a mass amount of people that have to believe in you.?

Talk about an intimidating proposition. ?Particularly for me because I’m kind of coming out of nowhere and I am completely unknown,? Fox says. ?So it was very intimidating but then they brought me in for chemistry with Shia [LaBeouf] and I really like Shia and got along with him. I think that helped me.?

What also helped her knowledge from an early age, 3, that she wanted to be an actress. So much so she stopped paying attention in school because she got too bored and couldn?t concentrate on the facts, figures and verbiage being thrown at her when her true calling was in front of her.

?My mom was like ?Look, you are going to get flunked out so lets just test you in correspondence school and see what happens,?? Fox says. ?I passed it immediately and I actually got here.?

Fox stands out not only for her beauty and acting prowess but for an odd collection of tattoos, the first of which she got when she turned 18. One is a head shot of Marilyn Monroe, another is tribal waves because as she says ?I am really in touch with the ocean and I am a surfer. It wasn?t done well. The guy was smoking weed.? Another one is an adapted reference from Shakespear?s King Lear reading ?We will all laugh at gilded butterflies.?

?To me it represents a warning sign to be a part of Hollywood,? Fox says. ?Be wary of it because you can be one of those girls that fall in too far. You become obsessed with it and people in the world end up laughing at you. You get lost.?

And Fox doesn?t want to get lost because she might take up one of the offers she gets from drive bys. ?People will drive past my car and scream at me, ?I?ll buy you an airplane if you give me your phone number,?? Fox says. ?I get all kinds of things like that but no one will come up to me and ask for my number.?

Source: IF Magazine