In a revealing Washington Post profile, Megan Fox opened up about motherhood and Hollywood. She says that she needed to step away from the “dark” of Hollywood to raise her kids and truly be happy. 

Of Hollywood, she said: “I was so lost and trying to understand, like, ‘How am I supposed to feel value or find purpose in this horrendous, patriarchal, misogynistic hell that was Hollywood at the time?’. Because I had already been speaking out against it and everyone, including other women, received me in a very negative way for doing it.”

The 35-year-old welcomed her first child with her ex Brian Austin Green in 2012. “That kind of saved me honestly,” Fox explained of becoming a mother to sons Noah, 8, Bodhi, 7, and Journey, 4, all of whom she shares withthe Beverly Hills, 90210 alum, 47. “I needed an escape.”

Of motherhood, she said: “It’s fertile soil. It’s given me the ground the I needed to grow into something quite special.”

The pair confirmed their split in May of 2020, when she was linked to boyfriend Machine Gun Kelly. She came back to Hollywood in 2016, guest-starring on New Girl. 

“People were surprised that I was funny at all,” she recalled, noting that her character, Reagan, was the closest she has ever played to her own personality. “More than being overlooked for my ability to handle comedy sometimes, I’ve always been surprised by how easy it was for people to overlook that I’m relatively intelligent. I was like, ‘How does that get so lost when there’s ridiculous amounts of material that can educate you otherwise?’”

She added: “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. 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.”