The 37-year-old actor is one of 28 celebrities — such as Martha Stewart and Kim Petras — starring on the cover of this year’s publication.
Speaking about the exciting opportunity with the outlet, Megan candidly admitted that despite her excitement about the shoot, she was super nervous.
“Shooting Sports Illustrated Swimsuit is definitely a lot of pressure,” she said, before later adding, “I have a vision in my head that I’m trying to achieve... I hope that the photos are beautiful.”
Megan later went on to discuss her struggle with body dysmorphia, which is an anxiety disorder related to body image.
“I have body dysmorphia. I don’t ever see myself the way other people see me,” she revealed.
“There’s never a point in my life where I loved my body. Never, ever,” she said. “When I was little, that was an obsession I had of like, ‘But I should look this way.’”
Megan went on to note that she has no idea where her acute awareness of her body stemmed from, explaining that she was raised in a Pentecostal Christian environment where physical appearances weren’t “acknowledged.”
“Why I had an awareness of my body that young, I’m not sure,” she said. “It definitely wasn’t environmental because I grew up in a very religious environment where bodies weren’t even acknowledged.”
At a different point in the interview, Megan said, “I remember being little, I would go in the bathroom and pull my shirt up and check to see if I had boobs yet.”
“The journey of loving myself is going to be never-ending, I think,” she added.
Elsewhere during the interview, Megan opened up about being “ridiculed” and vilified back in the late 2000s after she spoke out against film director Michael Bay.
In 2009, Megan — who’d starred in two Transformers movies at this point — found herself at the center of public scrutiny after describing Michael as a “nightmare to work with” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler during an interview.
“God, I really wish I could go loose on this one,” she said when asked what her least favorite things about working with him were. “He’s like Napoleon, and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.”
“He’s a nightmare to work for, but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward,” she added. “He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant.”
The interview sparked a wave of backlash as soon as it was published, and ultimately led to Megan being fired from the Transformers franchise and replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
Shortly afterwards, Megan went on to directly call Michael out for sexualizing her when she was underage in the 2003 film Bad Boys II.
Sitting down on Jimmy Kimmel Live! for the now-infamous interview, Megan recalled, “I had just turned 15, and I was an extra in Bad Boys II. They were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in — and I was wearing a Stars and Stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and six inch heels.”
“[Michael] approved it, and they said, ‘Michael, she’s 15 so you can’t sit her at the bar, and she can’t have a drink in her hand,” Megan went on.
“So, his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet,” she said. The audience immediately burst out laughing, while Jimmy nonchalantly noted, “perfectly wholesome.”
Looking uncomfortable, Megan shrugged and reiterated, “At 15, I was in 10th grade.” But once more, Jimmy simply laughed in response.
Megan added, “That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.” Jimmy replied, “Well, that’s really a microcosm of how all of our minds work. Some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”
Again, Megan looked super uneasy as the audience laughed at Jimmy’s remark. And as soon as the interview aired, the Transformers actor was mocked online by users making similar jokes and defending Michael.
Acknowledging the scrutiny now, Megan described her treatment as a “public crucifixion,” before comparing it to the treatment received by her character in the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body.
“I think Jennifer’s Body is still my favorite project and probably always will be because there’s just something about the timing of that. How it aligned with my public crucifixion that I was going through and my internal psychological breakdown,” Megan said.
“What the character went through was very much a metaphor for what I was going through in Hollywood and with media and with the world at large,” she explained.
“I was ahead of the #MeToo movement just in terms of timing, because I was coming out and talking about these things maybe a decade before,” Megan added.
It wasn’t until 2020 — a few years after the #MeToo movement had gained traction worldwide — that Megan’s past comments about Michael were taken more seriously by the public.
In fact, after a clip of the Kimmel interview resurfaced on Twitter and sparked renewed backlash, Megan wound up speaking in defense of Michael.
“Please hear me when I thank you for your support, but these specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry,” she wrote on Instagram.
“When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner,” she wrote, noting that she wanted to “clarify some details” that had gotten “lost in the retelling of the events.”
Now speaking about how she handled the scrutiny, Megan told Sports Illustrated, “I think that at the time I didn’t handle it well because when you believe or know that… what you’re saying is true and genuine and correct and should be heard but it’s not heard — and beyond not being heard, you’re ridiculed for it.”
“I’m fully OK now with people being upset,” she said, adding, “I don’t fucking care.”
