Megan Fox has had a good 2021. The actress has been happily dating Machine Gun Kelly, earning a top spot amongst Hollywood’s favorites celebrity couples. When it comes to her work, Fox is slated in two upcoming films, the horror thriller Till Death, released this weekend, and Midnight in the Switchgrass, which co-stars her boyfriend and will be released later this year. Her comfort with her celebrity status is a marked change from the past couple of years.

Fox built a career out of playing the “hot mean girl” in a variety of films, from Confessions to a Teenage Drama Queen to Jennifer’s Body, a film that has been reevaluated over the year despite being critically and commercially panned at the time of its release. Her role in the Transformer series made her an international superstar, but it also made her an easy target for misogyny. In all of her interviews and reviews of the time, the media was unable to discuss anything else besides her image.

“I think there has been a pervasive perception of me as a shallow succubus, if that makes any sense, for at least the first decade of my career,” Fox said in an interview with the Washington Post. ”And then that started to change more recently as people revisited my interviews, listened to me speak, and started to see me in a different way.”

Fox says that during the peak of her fame people were unable to view her work with an objective eye, something that affected her self-esteem and her relationship with Hollywood.

“I was never really established as having been talented,” Fox said.

Things started changing for Fox when she was cast in the TV series New Girl, with people seeing her in a different light, noticing that the actress has a skill for comedy. “People were surprised that I was funny at all. More than being overlooked for my ability to handle comedy sometimes, I‘ve always been surprised by how easy it was for people to overlook that I’m relatively intelligent,” she says.

Despite her charged experiences with Hollywood, Fox says she’s looking forward to new and fun challenges that will make her grow as an actor. She’s open to working on blockbuster films or on a sequel to Jennifer’s Body. “I don’t think it’s a hard movie to make a sequel to,” she said. “I mean, they should make it into a TV series. That would be cool.”