As he goes on leave for most of the summer, Jimmy Kimmel is getting scolded for an old clip in which he riffed on Megan Fox’s anecdote about how director Michael Bay treated her when she was 15.
Fox’s 2009 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has been viewed millions of times since it was shared Saturday. The poster noted how Bay sexualized the actor when she was underage and Kimmel made “gross jokes” about it in response.
In the clip, the then-23-year-old Fox told the talk show host what it was like to work with director Michael Bay when she was 15, predating her starring roles on his “Transformers” movies.
Fox recalled that she had been cast as an extra in “Bad Boys 2” and was to be shown at a bar wearing a stars and stripes bikini with a red cowboy hat. Bay approved the setup until he was reminded that the actor was 15 and couldn’t legally drink.
So his solution, she said, was to have her dance soaking wet under a waterfall.
“That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works,” she told the host.
To which Kimmel replied: “Well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work.”
“Some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist,” he continued.
The creepy comments earned him a beating on Twitter, just days after he announced ― amid renewed criticism for a recurring blackface sketch that he did on “The Man Show” ― that he was taking the summer off.
“What kind of boys will be boys bullshit is that?” one Twitter user wrote of Kimmel’s retort.
Here’s a sampling of Twitter replies.