Why it’s easy (and a bad idea) to hate Megan Fox

Why it’s easy (and a bad idea) to hate Megan Fox

Don't hate her ’cause she’s beautiful: Megan Fox gives good presser

We didn’t want to like her: she dresses tackily, probably can’t act and brazenly embraces ubiquity. Her hotness seems engineered by Germans. She has not a single humanizing physical flaw. Worse, she’s unapologetic. But in press conferences, red carpet moments and reports from trusty sources—i.e., non-gossip writers—Megan Fox is bloody brilliant. Her interviews are brash, funny and on-point. When she says the wrong thing, it’s on purpose. She’s generous that way, making it easy to hate her.

Rumours had it that she stayed out all night on King Street after the Midnight Madness premiere of Jennifer’s Body—but if that’s true, all the more kudos are due. The Fox showed at her morning-after press conference like it was brunch with the in-laws: dressed in demure ruffles, smiling warmly, sipping Lipton’s. Pure contrivance? Probably. But we’ll never say she’s dumb.

In truth, the Jennifers Body failing organ is Amanda Seyfried. Far from being the smart Betty to Fox’s airheaded Veronica, she came off as spacey and witless, answering in ums, eye rolls and leaden sound bites. To wit (or, er, not): “You know, I just kind of had to make it up, which is what acting is all about.” When a Toronto Star reporter asked Seyfried, inanely, how she felt about potentially “scaring the heck out of little girls” by acting in a freaky flick, it was Fox who snapped back out of turn.

“Why wouldn’t it scare the hell out of little boys, too?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, why would it just be young girls who are scared? Why not little boys?”

Fox’s real bête noire is her beauty, and when the talk turned to looks, it was the first time during the press conference that she sounded false. “In the movie, real is beautiful,” she said. “You don’t have to look like an airbrushed Cosmopolitan cover all the time to be beautiful.”

The irony is that Fox does look like an airbrushed Cosmopolitan cover, even when she’s five feet away under fluorescent lights. But that doesn’t mean it’s all sex and superficiality inside, and we should’ve known better than to judge.