Megan Fox is a superhero. Not the reptile-under-the-removable-human-shell variety—think species Superwoman, complete with celestial looks and the power to render most males speechless with one glance. This is incontrovertible, incontestable, indisputable. So why hasn’t the idea-ravenous pack of Hollywood producers, studio chiefs, packaging agents and imaginators in coffee shops across the scribe universe figured this out? How have they missed the myriad clues?

Let’s start at the beginning. Megan Denise Fox was born (or crash-landed) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on May 16, 1986. Alongside her sister Kristi, older by 12 years, Fox was raised in a strict domestic environment. Until about age 10, she attended a Pentecostal church complete with snake handling and revivals; as a little girl, she found escape in the Old and New Testaments, awed and entertained by the parting of seas, the plagues of locusts, and the many and varied fights and flights. “That passed for pop culture in our house,” Fox says, adding that the stories helped to initiate a lifelong interest in religions, and specifically in Christianity. “I’ve always been intrigued and repulsed by how divisive and hateful different Christian denominations are to one another despite their obvious commonalities and interconnections,” she says. Religion remains a central pillar in Fox’s life; she regularly attends an L.A. church that she says is “not judgmental, does not close its doors to anybody, and has a young, active, passionate congregation, which is how I like to experience church.”

Paradoxically, considering the many prohibitions she faced, Fox was allowed to perform from a very early age. She began dance class at the community center in nearby Kingston, Tenn., and created private re-characterizations of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz (Judy Garland was her childhood film idol). Her parents divorced when she was 5, and by the time Fox was 10, her mother Darlene had remarried and the family moved to Port St. Lucie, a small city on Florida’s Atlantic coast within easy driving distance of a much bigger stage: Miami. “It was close enough to pursue catalog modeling,” she says. “I started getting jobs quickly.” Fox has used adjectives like “abrasive,” “loner” and even “obnoxious” to describe herself during this period, and between ages 10 and 16 she was constantly grounded for transgressions that ranged from sneaking out of the house to “borrowing” the car long before she had a license.

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