Megan Fox, who found out she was pregnant after signing on to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, admits that she didn’t want to “show weakness” while filming because Hollywood’s “such a misogynist industry.”
The now the mother of two, Noah 1, and five-month-old Bodhi, participated in a roundtable discussion with Mom.me in which she talked about how hard it was to film the movie while pregnant.
“I wasn’t even quite seven months post-partum when I got pregnant again,” the 28-year-old actress tells Mom.me.
“I got pregnant 10 days, I think, into filming this. And this is an action movie, so there are a lot of stunts. We were filming in New York City in the summer. It’s hot, and you know during your first trimester all you want to do is just watch Bravo and lay in bed and you don’t want to get up and do stuff. I was waking up and I working 18-19 hour days to get this done. That’s the one thing about filmmaking — you can’t call in sick, or you can’t say like, ‘Oh, my kid has a fever’ or ‘I can’t come in today,’ because when you shut down production for a day, that’s a $1 million-$3 million loss. And so you have to just make it work.”
Fox said that she was also reluctant to bring up her pregnancy while on set because she didn’t want to be discriminated against.
“Thing is in Hollywood, you don’t want to show weakness as a woman because it is such a misogynist industry. To ever go to work and be like, ‘I have debilitating cramps,’ you can’t do that. You can’t be like, ‘Can I have a hot water bottle for my stomach?’ You have to act like you’re a superhero in order to be taken seriously or put on an equal playing field as the men. As soon as you like have a woman’s body and have women’s issues, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re a hazard for us,” basically. So you just have to pretend that you’re a lot stronger than you are a lot of the time.”
In the end, everything turned out okay with her pregnancy.
“We made it work and I did it, and my son was enormous. Everyone is safe and healthy and he was fine!”
