Megan Fox

On this day Fox, who is 23, seems less the grand media manipulator that she has been given credit for and more like a young woman who won the looks lottery and is trying to figure herself out amid a flurry of work, cash and flashbulbs. She claims that her fame is a burden. “It’s an immense amount of pressure, celebrity itself,” she says. “I didn’t create that. I didn’t sign up for that; I didn’t know that was going to happen. It created itself.” Fox halts, suddenly aware that a great many of her own choices—telling a men’s magazine in 2008, for instance, that her (made-up) stripper girlfriend “smelled like angels”—make such denials sound a little ridiculous. “[It’s happened] with my assistance, obviously,” she quickly adds. “Whatever. But it’s so big and it’s so much. Such a good portion of it is so negative. I think that if you are receptive to anything, if you feel anything ever, it’s impossible not to let it affect your life.”

Fox has found her recent escape to the New Mexican desert from Los Angeles to be a huge respite. “When you first get here, you’re like, Holy f---ing s---, there’s nothing!” Fox says, laughing. She had previously been to New Mexico to shoot a part of the second Transformers film, which Fox now says—despite the headlines suggesting serious tension between her and the crew, most notably director Michael Bay—was one of the most fun working experiences she has had. “I’m toying with the idea that because I come from an Indian background, Cherokee Indian, that maybe there’s something about the land [here] that is comforting to a past life I’ve had, ancestors or something,” she continues. It’s a rare moment of spiritual-speak for Fox, and she pauses, as if mentally conjuring the headline. “I like it here,” she finishes. “I don’t know if I could live here, but I do like it here.” While the quiet is a relief, Fox misses her boyfriend of five years, Nineties heartthrob Brian Austin Green, and his seven-year-old son, Kassius, both of whom live with her. (This winter she bought a house in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood—“That’s really all I’ve spent my money on so far; it’s all in the bank,” she says drily.) Fox has been in Kassius’s life since he was two, and though Green and Fox reportedly ended their engagement last year, they are very much together. “No one believes me when I talk about this, but I’m really, really maternal,” she says. “I worry that because I’ve always wanted [kids] so much, as the world goes sometimes, I won’t be able to have them, even though I would be able to provide them with such an amazing environment.” Fox twists her hair back into a knot and looks up at me. “And you know, the people who hate kids and don’t want kids always end up having 50 of them.”