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"  Megan Fox breezes into a West Hollywood nail salon 20 minutes late, with a gait that is vaguely feline and an expression that is not particularly apologetic. &amp;quot;Sorry, there were 20 paps on me,&amp;quot; she says, pulling off a pair of aviators and flicking back a whip-straight strand of dark hair. &amp;quot;They were parked outside my house this morning. I tried to lose them, but they&amp;#039;re out back.&amp;quot; (A peek out the window confirms that the paparazzi currently have this place surrounded.)   If you haven&amp;#039;t picked up a tabloid in six months and aren&amp;#039;t a men&amp;#039;s magazine reader, you may well be wondering, Who the hell is Megan Fox? You can bet your boyfriend\u2014and your brother, your dad, and the guy who rotates your tires\u2014is already in the know. To borrow a line from the cover of Maxim, Fox is simply &amp;quot;Earth&amp;#039;s Hottest Girl.&amp;quot; Yes, she appeared as a self-obsessed starlet in last year&amp;#039;s little-seen How to Lose Friends &amp;amp;amp; Alienate People. Mostly, though, she owes this distinction to the 2007 blockbuster Transformers, in which her tanned, taut midsection costarred with Shia LaBeouf and a muscle-car- turned-monster robot. Ka-ching! A pinup was born.   Fox&amp;#039;s looks may be lethal\u2014but her mouth? It&amp;#039;s a nuclear reactor. At 23, she possesses a vocabulary that could make Howard Stern blush and a complete inability to toe the line with standard starlet small talk. She regularly, and somewhat randomly, pokes fun at Zac Efron for being a cog in Disney&amp;#039;s mega-conglomerate wheel\u2014 but also jokes that they&amp;#039;re the same person. She has bragged about a past dalliance with a stripper named Nikita. She declares, with some vehemence, that men who believe that women shouldn&amp;#039;t curse can &amp;quot;go suck a dick.&amp;quot; (For the record, these expletive-laden rants come across more abrasively in print than they do in person.) At the Golden Globes, Fox, poured glamorously into a beaded gold gown, babbled to an E! reporter: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m pretty sure I&amp;#039;m a doppelg\u00E4nger for Alan Alda. I&amp;#039;m a trannie, I&amp;#039;m a man. No, I&amp;#039;m so painfully insecure, like I&amp;#039;m on the verge of vomiting...&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;So many actresses in Hollywood are just these little coat hangers who want to be America&amp;#039;s sweetheart,&amp;quot; says screenwriter Diablo Cody. &amp;quot;Megan has no such designs. She&amp;#039;s a badass, she&amp;#039;s a maverick, she&amp;#039;s not interested in pleasing people. She does her own thing.&amp;quot; Cody, who presumably has nothing against a woman who uses her sexuality to get ahead (she famously supported herself as a stripper before writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for Juno), says Fox was the only actress who was seen for the title role in Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body. Expected to hit theaters in September, Cody&amp;#039;s first movie since Juno is a genre-defying teen-comedy-slash-thriller-slash-drama about a high school flag team captain who\u2014get this\u2014feasts on the bodies of young men. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve seen a lot of men with that kind of swagger,&amp;quot; Cody says. &amp;quot;Maybe it&amp;#039;s time for the ladies to burn some bridges.&amp;quot;   So far, the only thing on fire is Fox herself. This month, she will reprise the role of Mikaela Banes, the gearhead girlfriend to LaBeouf&amp;#039;s good-hearted, goofy Sam Witwicky in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She also recently inked deals to star in two more comics-based action flicks. In the apocalyptic Western Jonah Hex, she&amp;#039;ll play a Wild West harlot to Josh Brolin&amp;#039;s mutilated avenger and John Malkovich&amp;#039;s twisted nemesis. And Fathom, which she is set to help develop, coproduce, and star in, is the story of a raven-haired, turquoise-eyed champion swimmer who discovers she&amp;#039;s a lost member of an aquatic superrace (warning: swimwear ahead).  Is Fox your local multiplex&amp;#039;s next action heroine? If so, the comics-fan blogosphere is already on board. For, unlike Jennifer Garner (Elektra), Charlize Theron (\u00C6on Flux), or even Jolie (Lara Croft), Fox is one of them: a bona fide comics geek (whose looks could have originated on a Marvel light box). If she weren&amp;#039;t acting, Fox says she&amp;#039;d probably be drawing comics for a living. Fathom, created by her favorite illustrator, the recently deceased Michael Turner, is one of her longtime obsessions; she even lobbied Turner for the privilege of playing the character and boasts an at-home library filled with his work.  And she talks special effects with the zeal of a fanboy. This time, she says, the Transformers are duking it out with &amp;quot;twice the budget, twice the explosives, and twice the robots and fight sequences. It&amp;#039;s a big, huge movie.&amp;quot; As in, Egyptian pyramids huge: Iconic action director Michael Bay imposed office-building-size robots (and filmed costar John Turturro) on the historic site. And massive-bomb huge: &amp;quot;Special effects was like, `This is the biggest bomb that we&amp;#039;ve ever exploded on set with actors, but you&amp;#039;re going to be perfectly safe; there&amp;#039;s no risk,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Fox says. &amp;quot;Then we look over for the special effects team, and they&amp;#039;re, like, two football fields away. There&amp;#039;s no other living person within half a mile of us. When it went off, we could feel the heat from the flames on our backs.&amp;quot; Not that a mere 500-gallon bomb is going to stand in her way. &amp;quot;Megan is one of the guys,&amp;quot; marvels LaBeouf (whom Fox calls &amp;quot;one of my favorite people on the planet&amp;quot;). &amp;quot;She isn&amp;#039;t scared or intimidated by anything.&amp;quot;  Instead of pumping iron to get action-star buff, Fox was ordered to eat. &amp;quot;Mike doesn&amp;#039;t want this little wispy, tiny girl to be the lead in his movie. He wants you to be substantial,&amp;quot; she says. Fox, who is 5&amp;#039;6&amp;quot;, had dwindled to 99 pounds while shooting Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body (&amp;quot;I decided I would turn myself into a zombie. I got super, super skinny, stayed out of the sun for four months, and got to where I was losing my eyelashes and my eyebrows&amp;quot;). Bay told her to add 10 pounds. (Apparently, 109 is considered meaty in Hollywood.) He also told her to tan. &amp;quot;He wants us to be, like, Brazilian! My foundation from the movie is the same color that they use on Jada Pinkett Smith,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We just look red. Not even orange\u2014we&amp;#039;re, like, maroon!&amp;quot;  Fox&amp;#039;s parents divorced when she was young; she and her sister were raised by her mother and stepfather, who she says &amp;quot;were really strict. I was grounded for all of my childhood. Not most\u2014all.&amp;quot; No wonder. She stole her mother&amp;#039;s car so often at 14 and 15 that she wasn&amp;#039;t allowed to get a license for fear she&amp;#039;d hit the road, once and for all. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t doing anything particularly crazy,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I just never appreciated authority figures preaching to me.&amp;quot;  In middle school, she was bullied and picked on; she ate lunch in the bathroom to avoid being pelted with ketchup packets. The problem wasn&amp;#039;t her looks\u2014she says at that point she was a scrawny adolescent with dyed orange hair. &amp;quot;I think, for me, what was intimidating was that I&amp;#039;ve always gotten along better with boys,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That rubbed some people the wrong way.&amp;quot;  She got her first acting gig in Holiday in the Sun, one of the Olsen sisters&amp;#039; many tween movies, when she was still in high school in Port St. Lucie, Florida. At 17, she tested out of school via correspondence and moved to Los Angeles. After two months, she landed the role of Lindsay Lohan&amp;#039;s rich-bitch archenemy in Disney&amp;#039;s Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Steady paychecks spelled freedom. &amp;quot;My mom lived with me until I started making enough money to support myself,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I was asking her to leave the entire time. I&amp;#039;d been ready to move out since I was, like, 14.&amp;quot;  Not long thereafter, 90210 alum Brian Austin Green (who now stars on Fox TV&amp;#039;s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) showed up on set to play himself in an episode of the Kelly Ripa sitcom Hope &amp;amp;amp; Faith\u2014or, as Fox puts it, &amp;quot;a really bad TV show I was working on.&amp;quot; The actress had no idea who Green was but says he seemed &amp;quot;sweet and quiet, harmless. I was like, Oh my God, I have to be with you. You&amp;#039;re not a threat, you&amp;#039;re not some d-bag that&amp;#039;s going to cause a lot of problems.&amp;quot; Green, 30 to her 18, wasn&amp;#039;t so sure. &amp;quot;I had to convince him that I was slightly more responsible and well-spoken and had other things to bring to the table besides being 18,&amp;quot; she says.  Which brings us back to the mob of jostling, juvenile men pressed against the window of this spa: The paparazzi have been hounding her mercilessly for two weeks, ever since rumors surfaced that she and Green had broken off their two-year engagement. In an unusual show of restraint, Fox has refused to publicly address the matter. Informed of one seemingly innocuous tidbit\u2014 that she and Green are supposedly in couples therapy\u2014her temper flares. &amp;quot;No, I do not want to comment on my relationship, period. It&amp;#039;s private. It doesn&amp;#039;t belong to the world. It&amp;#039;s mine. It&amp;#039;s Brian&amp;#039;s. It&amp;#039;s not for other people to judge and talk about and write about in In Touch Weekly.&amp;quot;  Fox says the theory that her sudden success emasculated Green (fueled in part by her own sarcastic remarks, again at the Golden Globes, which she attended solo, that &amp;quot;he doesn&amp;#039;t want to be my date...he&amp;#039;s a man. He has an ego&amp;quot;) is ridiculous. &amp;quot;He went through this already, and he doesn&amp;#039;t want it back\u2014it was horrible,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So he has sympathy. He&amp;#039;s the one person that I know that if I&amp;#039;m struggling and everything&amp;#039;s getting crazy, I can call.&amp;quot;  Rebound buzz has already kicked up. Was she secretly dating Twilight star Robert Pattinson? &amp;quot;I just randomly asked someone for a light and it was him. That was the extent of our `relationship.&amp;#039; But I&amp;#039;m sure there&amp;#039;s going to be a different guy every week now.&amp;quot;  Pattinson, for the record, isn&amp;#039;t her type anyway. &amp;quot;He and Zac\u2014 they&amp;#039;re just too pretty with the big hair and the suits. And Rob is, what, 22? Zac is 21? That&amp;#039;s a joke. Boys in their twenties are a waste of time. They have nothing to offer conversationally; they&amp;#039;re immature. I feel like I have a better shot with someone in his thirties.&amp;quot;   Never mind that she&amp;#039;s still seven years shy of that particular milestone. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve lived the life of a 35-year-old since I was 18,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so suspicious of all boys-slash-men. I just don&amp;#039;t like them or trust them.&amp;quot;  She does, however, enjoy manipulating them. Fox says she&amp;#039;s given certain male writers an amped-up version of her past. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re boys; they&amp;#039;re easily toyed with,&amp;quot; she says, laughing. &amp;quot;I tell stories and have them eating out of my hand. Not all of it is true. In fact, most of it is bullshit.&amp;quot; Sorry, guys\u2014she never stripped as a teen (though, for lack of anything better to do, she and a group of friends did frequent a seedy strip club). And la femme Nikita? &amp;quot;I never said she was my girlfriend! I just said that I loved her, and I did love her,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;The real story is more sobering. It&amp;#039;s not a sexy, fun-time, fantasy story. But that&amp;#039;s not the story you tell GQ.&amp;quot;  Surely such embroideries get her in trouble? &amp;quot;Oh, all the time!&amp;quot; she laughs. &amp;quot;Because it&amp;#039;s then my publicist&amp;#039;s job to try to clean it up.&amp;quot; Fox seems torn between playing the living, breathing male fantasy\u2014Bad Girl Barbie, if you will\u2014and wanting, of course, to be seen as more than some 2-D cardboard cutout. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like, Wait a minute\u2014I actually have things to say,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I have a pretty amazing personality, and I&amp;#039;m pretty intelligent. Don&amp;#039;t just write me off as a pinup.&amp;quot; But don&amp;#039;t call her naive, either. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the same old bullshit struggle that everyone who&amp;#039;s ever been on the cover of a men&amp;#039;s magazine complains of having,&amp;quot; she says with a shrug. &amp;quot;My situation is not a new one.&amp;quot;  CHECK OUT THE JUNE ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON MEGAN FOX "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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