You want to talk about life imitating art? Hollywood crucified Megan Fox, and now she’s back, with absolutely zero f–ks to give, and a role as an alluring vampire in the new Netflix horror movie “Night Teeth.”

It’s a plot twist straight out of “Jennifer’s Body,” her 2009 horror-comedy first panned as a misfire, then elevated to feminist cult classic. It’s also the movie that inspired countless women to come out of the closet, in part thanks to Fox’s steamy makeout scene with Amanda Seyfried (and also with a lighter, but that was more of a demonic possession thing).

“I can’t tell you how many girls, from 30 down into their teens — or, f–k that, my age, too — come up to me and are like, ‘I realized I was gay because of you,’ or ‘I felt comfortable coming out because of you,’ because of ‘Jennifer’s Body’ and the interviews I did about being biSєxual before it was cool,” says the 35-year-old Fox, who celebrated Pride this year with a rainbow mani on Instagram and the caption “Putting the B in #LGBTQIA for over two decades.”

“That’s something that’s so important to me, that I’m so proud of,” she says. “If my purpose on Earth was to help one girl come out of the closet and feel OK about it, I had an amazing purpose here.”

Fox isn’t big on small talk. She’s an intense Zoom hang. It’s great. She speaks her mind in a way that I’m sure has caused many a publicist to tear their hair out over the years.

Fox isn’t holding back with her new relationship, either. She and former Alexa cover star Machine Gun Kelly have been positively scorching red carpets and Instagram with their public appearances, often with Fox dressed in as little as possible. Their Goth-tinged declarations of lust and undying love have made them the couple of the year. But even though Kelly towers over her, you get the sense it’s Fox calling the sH๏τs. (Exhibit A: a British GQ cover that features a crouching Fox pointing a gun at Kelly’s crotch.) In mid-September, she dominated coverage of the VMAs with her sheer, wet-look Mugler dress and thong, calling MGK her “future baby daddy” onstage — and, mischievously, just “Daddy” on the red carpet.

She’s rarely pH๏τographed smiling, which is refreshing in our era of relentless social media positivity. Hers is more resting badᴀss face than resting bitch face.

Today, though, she’s wearing a “Flashdance”-esque slouchy black tee and a friendly expression, seated on the floor in front of a couch. I relay a recent YouTube comment that resonated: “Megan Fox was always too punk rock for her time.”

“Word,” she says, with a smile (a smile!). “I appreciate that, for sure. I went through a decade where I believed in what I had done, and in everything I said. Granted, it came out of a young mouth and I probably would have articulated it in a different way now, but my intention was always super honest.”

In an infamous interview with Wonderland magazine, Fox went nuclear on her “Transformers” director, Michael Bay: “He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.” She also called out a directorial style that, one imagines, might not fly as well today, claiming Bay’s directions on set to her were often limited to: “Be H๏τ.” At the time (2009), the world lost its damn mind. Bay’s crew trashed her in the media. Co-star Shia LaBeouf trashed her. She was portrayed as brainless, as being ungrateful to have had a role at all. And then she had the audacity to opt out of the third installment of the series. (Bay told GQ that executive producer Steven Spielberg told him to fire her after the Hitler comment.)

“I quit one of the biggest franchises Hollywood has ever had. And I had to live with people being like, ‘You were fired because you were a pain in the ᴀss,’” she says. “I didn’t open my mouth to defend myself, I just lived with it. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I knew it would circle back around. Even if it was after I was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, I knew eventually people would have a better understanding of what was really happening at the time. I’m happy I lived to see it, I guess,” she adds with a bleak laugh.

She’s said that despite her experiences with harᴀssment in Hollywood, she doesn’t feel she’s seen as a “sympathetic victim.”

“A lot of women fall into this archaic, critical, mom-shaming, slut-shaming thing,” she says. “It’s like, ‘You’re 35, you have three kids, you shouldn’t be wearing that.’ So I don’t exist in a world where it’s like, oh, we all transcended the patriarchy. A lot of narratives are being spat out that are toxic to women, by other women. And that is a tragedy.”

But Fox isn’t wasting much time on the haters (and she’s definitely not reading the comments). She’s got several movies in the works, including a juicy part in “Johnny & Clyde,” an update of the crime-spree classic; a newly announced role in “The Expendables 4”; and the dark comedy “Big Gold Brick,” alongside Oscar Isaac and Andy Garcia. She received raves for her performance in this summer’s “Till Death,” as a woman fighting her way out of a diabolically engineered trap. That’s the kind of work she prefers, she says: “like action-heavy stuff. I like using my body, I like to be physical.”

Fox got her acting start in, of all places, an Olsen twins movie, 2001’s “Holiday in the Sun.” She met Brian Austin Green, whom Gen Xers will remember as David Silver on the original “90210,” just three years later. He was 30 and she was 18. They were together for 16 years — a lifetime in Hollywood, as the saying goes. They have three kids they’re now co-parenting since filing for divorce (and coming to a settlement this week).

She has since, famously, moved on to dating MGK. She and Kelly — née Colson Baker — met in 2020 on the set of the serial killer drama “Midnight in the Switchgrᴀss,” which came out this summer and, despite a respectable performance from Fox, was panned, even by her costar boyfriend on Twitter. Baker plays a skeezy pimp, and the two sparked immediately in the scene where she beats him up.

“I wish someone had asked me, when I was, like, 6, to draw a picture of the perfect boy,” Fox says. “He would be weirdly tall, to where it almost looks painful, and super thin, and blond, and have earrings and tattoos and be wearing tartan pants and, like, a woman’s blouse.

“And he manifested and is real! Aesthetically, [Baker] is my perfect crush. I think I was pre-programmed to be attracted to him. I always wanted a boyfriend who would share a closet with me and wear my clothes. I don’t know how he gets them on his body, but he does, and it looks really good.”

Baker’s an edgy clotheshorse who has drawn Fox into the fun of dressing up. (She even launched her own fashion collaboration with Boohoo this week.) At this year’s Billboard Music Awards, she wore a sheer, black, heavily cut-out Mugler gown that matched Baker’s black-dyed tongue.

The way she talks about him — they’ve called themselves “twin flames” — feels like they met mere days ago and have been having Sєx nonstop. Which her role in his S&M-tinged “Bloody Valentine” video didn’t exactly tamp down. But it’s been a year and they’re living together (and tattooing each other) now. He calls twice just during the hour we’re on Zoom. He also stopped by her pH๏τo shoot for this story, popping in to surprise her, much to everyone’s amusement.

“My agent was in the hallway, and I saw he was talking to somebody like this [she tilts her face steeply upward] and there are only so many people who are that tall.” Baker’s 6-foot-5 and Fox is 5-foot-4. It’s hardly the only glaring difference between them.

“I like going to bed at 10 and getting up at 6 and going for a hike and meditating,” she says. “And he’s going to bed at 5 a.m. and waking up at 8 p.m.”

She’s also sober, which is a challenge when your boyfriend is a rockstar. “Being in a f–king nightclub isn’t fun when you’re not drunk — I’m just sitting there watching everybody, like, when is it over?”

She did make an exception to her no drugs rule, though, to try psychedelic mushrooms with Baker — “I had such a lovely experience, I hope it becomes legal” — and to do an ayahuasca ceremony, in which the two ingested a ritual shamanic hallucinogen. Fox, a Tennessee native, was raised in the Pentecostal Christian church, and she says she “literally went through hell” on her trip. Still, she cheerfully recommends the experience. “It makes you so grateful for your life.”

I tell her it’s nice to see her having so much fun in her relationship with Baker.

“I’m so happy in this moment of my life,” Fox says. “That’s something I didn’t get when I was younger. I wish I had been more present. I’ve learned to just appreciate the moment I’m in.”

All too soon, our time is up. “OK,” she says, “I’m going to call him back. Bye!”