Simply fast-forwarding to any given moment in Transformers where Megan Fox appears on screen provides a pretty compelling argument that director Michael Bay maybe, just maybe—hear us out here—doesn’t have a dog-eared copy of The Second Sex sitting on his nightstand. But such assumptions, as obvious as they may be, are unnecessary, as Fox herself has opened her pretty little mouth on several occasions to condemn Bay’s behavior on set. Here’s what she told Jimmy Kimmel in 2009:
The first time I ever met him, I was 15, and I was an extra on Bad Boys 2. We 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. And they took me to Mike and he approved it. And they said, ‘You know, Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand.’ So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet. And that’s… At 15 and I was in tenth grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.
Uh-oh, looks like Bay’s invitation to the NOW Conference might get lost in the mail this year. And lest you think this is just personal animosity between Bay and Fox—a feud solved easily enough with a fat paycheck and a yellow jumpsuit, apparently—now Kate Beckinsale, who co-starred in Bay’s 2001 paean to stuff blowing up all patriotic-like Pearl Harbor, has some less than kind words about her former director’s sexist attitude towards her looks.
Citing an interview Beckinsale gave on The Graham Norton Show, People quotes Beckinsale as saying, “I don’t think I fitted the type of actress Michael Bay the director had met before … I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren’t bigger than my head, and I wasn’t blonde.” Bay’s also been known to deem brunettes fuckable, but go on.
Beckinsale also says that Bay told her she’d have to hit the gym if she wanted to be in his movie, even though WWII-era Navy nurses weren’t exactly known for their ripped abs. But the negging didn’t stop there: “When we were promoting the film, Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben [Affleck] and Josh [Hartnett], and he said, ‘I have worked with Ben before and I love him, and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor,’” Beckinsale says. “Then when he was asked about me, he’d say, ‘Kate wasn’t so attractive that she would alienate the female audience.’ He kept saying it everywhere we went.”
We’re sure he was just respecting you for your mind, Kate.