megan fox has her fingers in her long black hair, and as she tosses her head this way and that, she runs her hands slowly down her face and onto her neck and chest. She’s panting as if undergoing some very heavy exertion. “My daddy’s in prison,” she heaves. “Sam! Sam! We’re not leaving without Bumblebee!”

Fox is having breakfast in a hotel lobby in San Diego, and this “Sam! Sam!” bit is her impression of her work in Transformers—the movie that launched her career in 2007 and earned her such dubious honors as the Sexiest Woman in the World. She’s not exactly proud of the performance. “It’s like: Fuck. Fuck!” she says. “Every time that movie is playing on a plane, I pull my hat down like blinders.” It’s been a year since Transformers director Michael Bay had her bend her denim-skirted body over the hood of a ’76 Camaro, a moment that’s since blown up on the Web and made Fox into Farrah Fawcett for the Internet-video age. But lately, Fox has begun to see all the attention coming her way as a problem. “I don’t want to be famous right now,” she says. “I’ve done one movie. And it’s not a movie I want to stand on as far as acting ability goes. I mean—I’m not going to win an Oscar anytime soon. I’m not Meryl Streep.”

There are, she says, all sorts of perils in becoming famous at 22 without having earned it. There’s the anxiety (“Before I go onstage anywhere, I take a Xanax now”), the endless gossipy attention (“The other day, I said I eat a lot of cake, and that was the top story on Yahoo!”), the comparisons to older actresses whose biographies even remotely resemble hers—in Fox’s case, Angelina Jolie (“I don’t even consider her human; she’s like a superhuman goddess”). More than anything else, Fox is worried that all the hype might cause everything to fizzle out before she’s given a chance to, you know, act. “I want people to know me through the movies I do,” she says. “I want to be judged on that. If you start becoming famous for your personal life, that’s when your career goes away.”

She is here in San Diego for Comic-Con—an annual convention that draws more than 125,000 admirers of all things superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy—in part because her fiancé, Brian Austin Green (of original 90210 fame), is participating in a panel on his latest TV show but also because she’s been into comic books since she was a kid. Our plan for the day is this: After breakfast, Megan and I—along with a former Marine turned security guard named Anthony—will head out onto the Comic-Con floor, where Megan wants to meet some graphic artists whose work she admires and shop for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. It seems straightforward enough—except for the fact that there’s likely no greater concentration of Megan Fox fanboys anywhere on the planet. After hearing what we’d be doing, the first question the security firm that Anthony works for asked was: “Do you want your guard armed?” (Um, no guns, please.) A friend and Transformers fan with some appreciation of how the crowd might react to Fox described walking around with her as akin to “chumming a shark tank.”

when megan fox was 19, she posed half-naked for a magazine photo shoot and boasted in the accompanying interview that she possessed “the libido of a 15-year-old boy.” (She also described a tattoo she’d gotten of her boyfriend’s name as being “next to my pie”—not exactly the kind of thing you say if you’re hoping to keep a low profile.) At that time, Fox was filming the third season of ABC’s Hope & Faith, a family-friendly sitcom starring Kelly Ripa that’s best summed up by its eventual fate—syndication on the WE network—and she was fed up with playing the coquettish yet chaste teen. The show was repressing her, she says, tamping down her sexuality: “Sex is something that everyone does, so why can’t I talk about it?” Sexual double standards make Fox angry, and when conversation turns to tabloid-flamed scandals surrounding other teen stars who’ve been photographed in various stages of nudity and seminudity, she goes off: “With any of the Miley Cyrus shit, or any of that Vanessa Hudgens shit—I would never issue an apology for my life and for who I am. It’s like, Oh, I’m sorry I took a naked, private picture that someone is an asshole and sold for money. I’m sorry if someone else is a dick. No. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Someone betrayed Vanessa, but no one’s angry at that person. She had to apologize. I hate Disney for making her do that. Fuck Disney.”

Can I get that on the record?

“Yeah. Fuck Disney.”

There goes your career.

“Yeah, that was probably a bad move—they own everything. But it’s not right. They take these little girls, and they put them through entertainment school and teach them to sing and dance, and make them wear belly shirts, but they won’t allow them to be their own people. It makes me sick.”