Scans

On her baby boy Noah:
“I recognize the blessings when they come – like, I recognize I’m so lucky to work with Judd – but the ultimate satisfaction for me is being with my son. All I wanted to do my whole, whole life was to have a baby and, now, I’ve finally done it.”

On her hubby, Brian:
“I just think we got lucky. I believe he’s my soulmate. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take work, because we are very, very different. But we are tolerant of each other and we try to be patient with each other, and I don’t try to turn him into me and he knows not to try to turn me into him. He really is amazing. I should never, ever even think about complaining.”

On her priorities:
“I just want to give Noah as much of myself as I can. And I want to have more kids. This is where my heart is. It’s very hard for me to do this stuff, because I feel like this isn’t my job any more. My job is to be with him.”

On the effects of motherhood:
“I can’t watch the news any more. Everything makes me cry. Because everyone is someone’s child, every woman seems like someone’s mother. I have so much patience for people and women in general.”

Rather than letting her sex appeal burn her out, she is trying to contain it, channel it, make it work for her, not others. To see if that’s possible.

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.

Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. She’s sitting on a sectional sofa in workout clothes and a sweatshirt that hide her body, her knees folded beneath her.

The sacrifice’s year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.

Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec. She’s a screen saver on a teenage boy’s laptop, a middle-aged lawyer’s shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.

“It’s so similar. It totally is,” she says quietly.

The room, which has the feel of a finished basement, is packed with pinball machines and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars memorabilia. Darth Vader stares down from a poster on the wall. A life-sized model of R2-D2 keeps watch in the corner.