In the backroom of a studio, Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox are giving each other tattoos while I watch. The lovebirds’ matching tattoos will read, ‘The darkest fairytale’, a phrase Fox says ‘alludes back to one of the first text messages we ever sent each other’. Fox wants to get inked first, because MGK has tattooed before and she’d rather not delay the pain. 
MGK clarifies he’s done some drunk scrawling with the tattoo gun before, but this is serious. He dips the needle in ink, presses down on the traced phrase and looks at Fox to make sure she’s OK. Fox puffs on a CBD joint to relax and they both decide they might as well just jump into it. He starts going over the stencil with the needle, pausing sometimes to take stock of his work and wipe the pen ink. ‘God, that’s sick,’ he says as she looks at his handiwork. He smiles at Fox. It’s going very well, but they could use more direct light.
This is how I find myself holding my iPhone flashlight over Machine Gun Kelly’s pelvis while he reclines on a green velvet chaise. Fox, clad in a flannel shirt, crouches over him and places the tattoo stencil along his hip. While they had originally wanted to have the tattoos on their respective inner-arm veins, MGK is absolutely covered in tats already, from his stomach anarchy symbol to a giant ‘MGK’ back piece. To find a place where the tattoo wouldn’t get lost, they have to go further south. Fox presses the inked tattoo needle into his skin while he encourages her to go harder. A few minutes later, she’s done. ‘I’m just scared that I fucked it up!’ she exclaims nervously. He reᴀssures her instantly: ‘ҒUCҜing best tattoo I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Fox thinks she went too light, but they’ll let it heal and go over it later. ‘It looks like a fairy ghost did it, right?’ MGK says. ‘It’s all haunted.’ She laughs at that and they kiss.
I’m witnessing a ritual that is equal parts sacred and profane – a physical consummation of sorts for the pair. The first thing you need to know is that they are an absolutely gorgeous couple, seemingly made for each other. The musician, born Colson Baker but better known as Machine Gun Kelly, is a handsome 6ft 4in punk with white-blond hair and is covered in tattoos. Fox, an actress, is the most beautiful woman I have ever met, a Frank Frazetta pin-up girl drawing come to life, today wearing Bettie Page bangs and a deep brown lip colour. She is the ideal cool-babe consort for a burgeoning superstar like MGK, a rapper turned rocker whose new album, Born With Horns, is executive-produced by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. The record is dark pop punk that chronicles MGK’s recent life leading up to the moment he met Fox on a movie set and they fell in love.
While they make quite a pair in person, their love runs deeper than the obvious physical chemistry, to a place of what they describe as a spiritual connection. It is intoxicating to be around two people who are this far gone for one another. Together with their double-date pals Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, they are bringing back Sunset Strip rock’n’roll glamour for the 2020s, as the kind of couple that’s fun to watch be in love with each other and who have what Fox calls the ‘combustible element’ of all celebrities. They walk in the footprints etched by the platform boots of partnerships such as Tommy and Pam, Kurt and Courtney or Mick and Marianne, but with a key difference: they’re trying their damndest to make sure things don’t blow up. They’re both at a place in their lives where they’re really willing to lay it all on the line for love.
It’s only been a few hours since I first encounter the pair at a pH๏τoshoot deep in Downtown LA’s warehouse zone. They are entangled together in front of a gunmetal-grey 1970s Cadillac while “Leader Of The Pack” by The Shangri-Las plays on the stereo, as two cars shine headlights on them and horror fog is blasted through the parking lot.
Fox and MGK are in Love, with a capital L. While they are both famous Sєx symbols, they act like kids together. He treats her with the respect she has always deserved and that itself is very romantic. Their energy together is playful. They make each other laugh. The carnal component is clearly off the charts, but they can also be sweet and funny. While they wait around between shoot setups, Fox stands barefoot on MGK’s leopard-print slippers and he slow-dances her around the room. When they are together, it’s like nobody else exists. For an intimate close-up, he requests a music change and asks for ‘Mazzy’ – which I ᴀssume will be some up-and-coming rapper but turns out to be Mazzy Star, the melancholic LA band fronted by Hope Sandoval – and their classic “Fade Into You”. This is one of many unexpected twists about MGK. He jokes that if they can’t find the song on his phone, he’ll also accept “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” by Dem Franchize Boyz.
The next stop is the Soho Warehouse for dinner, the Downtown LA outpost of the members’ club Soho House. Plates of lamb chops, prawns, ravioli and pizza are brought out to the table. The dining room overlooks the sparkling LA skyline and loud 2000s music (think Ja Rule and J.Lo) blares from the speakers. MGK has changed into a T-shirt he was gifted at the shoot. It’s printed with a pH๏τo of Mickey and Mallory, the iconic outlaw couple from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. Movies are one of the things that brought the two together. ‘The Lost Boys was our first movie we watched together,’ he reminisces, ‘and then True Romance and Point Break.’
‘Oh, Point Break is the best – he had never seen it,’ Fox adds. ‘True Romance was his choice.’
‘I love a dark fairy tale,’ he confirms.
MGK and Fox say they really met for the first time in 2020 on the set of the action flick Midnight In The Switchgrᴀss, but they actually met briefly a few years before that, introduced at a GQ party in LA. ‘This weird thing happened,’ says Fox. ‘We didn’t see each other.’ She looks at him. ‘Do you remember [seeing] my face?’
‘That’s what’s crazy,’ he says, ‘I don’t. I don’t remember your face.’
‘I don’t remember your face… And I definitely would have remembered his face,’ she continues. ‘I just remember this tall, blond, ghostly creature and I looked up and I was like, “You smell like weed.” He looked down at me and he was like, “I am weed.” Then, I swear to God, he disappeared like a ninja in a smoke bomb.’
They both laugh about how they couldn’t see each other’s faces. Fox has a theory: ‘I think we weren’t allowed to see each other yet. We weren’t supposed to run into each other that night, so our souls, our spirit guides, were luring us away from each other, because you literally had no face, like that thing from Spirited Away. It is hard to see his face in general, but really he had no face that night.’ She turns to him. ‘Thank God, [because] what torture had I known you were there and I couldn’t get to you. It was better that I didn’t know.’
So when Fox and MGK met for the second time, the first real time, she reminded him of their first meeting. Then, while shooting, via his character’s first line of dialogue to the actress, he had to say something fucked up to her. But what they were both feeling didn’t take words. ‘It was obvious from second one what it was going to be,’ Fox says of their relationship, ‘but we didn’t hook up right away.’ They started courting in the green room ‘She was just like, “How are you feeling?” he recalls, ‘And I said, “I’m lost.” She said, “Well, let’s find you.” That was the first real conversation we had.’
He sent her a couple of text messages, one that said, ‘I am weed,’ and another that repeated his filthy first line of dialogue to her, as if he couldn’t believe he’d said these dumb things to Megan Fox the first two times they interacted. Fox was charmed. ‘I just responded like, “How every fairy tale begins.”’ To which he ended the conversation with, ‘All the good ones at least…’
After that they texted some more and graduated to talking on the phone. ‘Did you ever talk to a girl for three hours on the phone in your whole life?’ Fox teases. ‘Were you like, “How the fuck am I going to talk to her?”’
‘It felt like five minutes, so it didn’t even feel like three hours,’ he responds. ‘Even our first kiss, she wouldn’t kiss me. We just put our lips right in front of each other and breathed each other’s breath and then she just left.’
Fox says she was trying to protect her heart, even though she knew she was already falling hard for him. She wasn’t looking for love: ‘[I was] definitely open [to] love, but I did not anticipate walking right into my soulmate like that. I was obviously over the way I had been living, and those paths lined up, those doors opened. It was [as if] all the obstacles that had kept us apart all those years [had been removed] and we were able to finally intersect.’
For their first real date MGK picked Fox up in a 1974 Cadillac convertible and they listened to Ella Fitzgerald. He drove her to a canyon’s edge where he had a friend waiting with a picnic set up on a blanket and a sea of roses. Then they drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Roxy Theatre, which was closed. ‘We went to the roof and played pop punk and made out,’ he recalls, tippling a glᴀss of Casamigos tequila.
Had MGK ever fallen in love before? ‘No, no, no. It’s, like, because you’ve been around the world and experienced so much sнιт, you think you know everything. And then you are in the arms of your destiny and realise “I don’t know sнιт yet”. That’s when the adventure starts, right?’ Fox, too, feels like she finally found someone who really gets her: ‘I think I had either put myself in, or allowed other people to put me in, this weird box that didn’t quite fit me, where I hadn’t lived my own life as myself for a really long time – the parts of me that were always eccentric or strange and didn’t belong within my own family unit or within Hollywood.’
Fox was a teenage actress from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who was frequently cast as a beautiful mean girl before doing a stint on the ABC sitcom Hope & Faith. She ended up in the Transformers blockbusters where she became a superstar Sєx symbol who sparked public debate about the Sєxualisation of actresses, a conversation that made her into a symbol and spiralled far away from her actual personhood. In person, she is thoughtful and initially a little shy. She chooses her words very carefully, especially when talking about her career path. She has shown a range of depth extending to dark dramas, horror and comedy, while Gen-Z star Olivia Rodrigo, in her “Good 4 U” music video, channelled Jennifer’s Body, the 2009 Karyn Kusama horror comedy in which Fox portrayed a cheerleader with very sharp teeth. Hollywood seemingly still has no idea what to do with a gorgeous, smart actress, forcing them to build their careers on their own terms. Fox has shifted to indie movies and ensembles. Upcoming releases include Big Gold Brick with Oscar Isaac and Night Teeth on Netflix in October.