You Always Have An Expiration Date

- Merle Ginsberg

 

You don’t show up to interview Megan Fox expecting to talk about archaeology. Or neurology for that matter. Never mind Egyptology.But here we are, deep in conversation about Tutankhamen, on a sofa at a photo studio in Hollywood. It’s apt, because without breaking into magazine cliché too much, there’s something of the Nefertiti about Megan herself. There’s the generous, perpetually pursed mouth, the beguiling, slightly slatted eyes and the nose, so perfect in its architecture that it should be in a glass case in Giza.

Fox has been a part of the paparazzi (and male) glare for as long as I can remember – her face and body plastered across men’s magazines, tabloid newspapers and, presumably, adolescent boys’ walls since she hit the screen as a virtually unknown 21-year-old in 2007’s Transformers. Her beauty and sexuality hit us all with the velocity of a young Angelina Jolie. Almost overnight she became one of the most googled women on the planet. The Los Angeles Times, always a fan of the hyperbole, called her “the first bona fide sex symbol of the 21st century”. Megan Fox became the Marilyn Monroe of our generation – a knockout who looked good in a bikini and cut-off denim shorts, but whose talent and fiery intellect few bothered to investigate. Her social media following ballooned (she has nearly 55 million followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram combined. “And I only post, like, every three months,” she laughs). Such is the power of her ‘brand’.