Emily Ratajkowski Calls out ‘This Is 40’ for Treating Megan Fox’s Character ‘So Badly’

Emily Ratajkowski is sticking up for Megan Fox‘s character in This Is 40. The model was overheard talking to comedian Amy Schumer during the Tribeca Film Festival, Page Six reported, discussing the Judd-Apatow directed 2012 comedy featuring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segel and Fox as Desi, a boutique employee who is also a sex worker on the side.

Several moments in This Is 40 sexualize Fox’s character, including one scene in which Mann’s character touches Fox’s breasts, saying, “I mean, they really are amazing. That’s firm, for real. They’re like a memory mattress.” Ratajkowski reportedly told Schumer, a close friend to Apatow, that the movie is “hilarious and very spot-on,” adding, “I recommend everybody who has a husband or wife and kids to watch it, [but] Megan Fox is treated in it so badly.” The outlet reported that Schumer responded, “Ooh, that movie is not aging well?” to which Ratajkowski replied, “That movie is not aging well.”

Fox hasn’t responded to reports about the conversation but has been candid about how being sexualized throughout her career had a negative effect on her mental health. In September 2019, she opened up to Jennifer’s Body director Diablo Cody for Entertainment Tonight about a dark time in her career, saying she felt like she was “out and in front of the #MeToo movement” before it even happened. “I was speaking out and saying, ‘Hey, these things are happening to me and they’re not OK,’” she said at the time. “And everyone was like, ‘Oh well, f— you. We don’t care, you deserve it.’ Because everybody talked about how you looked or how you dressed or the jokes you made.”

Being sexualized in her career and personal life “preceded a breaking point” for Fox, who admitted she thinks she had a “genuine psychological breakdown” where she wanted “just nothing to do.” She explained, “I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet. I didn’t want to be seen in public at all because the fear, and the belief, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out… so I went through a very dark moment after that.”