GALLERY LINK:

• (x1340) Movies: Passion Play

“I haven’t seen it yet but I want to,” says Megan.

“It’s not like I didn’t want to see it because I did. The trailer looked awesome but I didn’t want to go to a crowded theater and watch it because of how that may have looked.

“I have no problem with Transformers or Shia (LaBeouf). He’s a great guy and I still count him as a friend.”

GALLERY LINK:

• (x0069) Appearances 2011: At Friends With Kids Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival – September 9th

GALLERY LINK:

• (x0029) Candids 2011: On the Set of This is Forty in L.A. – August 23rd

GALLERY LINK:

• (x0024) Candids 2011: On the Set of This is Forty in L.A. – August 22nd

GALLERY LINK:

• (x0019) Candids 2011: On the Set of This is Forty in L.A. – August 16th

The 25-year-old actress shared a behind-the-scenes photo with costars Chris O’Dowd, 31, and Jason Segel, 31, on Facebook Saturday, calling them “two very handsome, very tall, very funny men.”

Though Fox showed off her healthier new curves on Wednesday, she kept her figure hidden while posing underwater in the pool.

The Judd Apatow flick, which revolves around Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s characters from the 2007 smash Knocked Up, also stars Melissa McCarthy, John Lithgow, Maude Apatow and Ava Sambora.

“Megan is hilarious,” Rudd, 42, recently told E! News. “I don’t know if people don’t realize that, but she is really really funny.”

Well, now you can.

No, she’s not pregnant, but…

Fox was spotted earlier this week in Los Angeles filming This Is Forty, Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up sequel that revolves around Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s characters from the hit comedy.

Fox has a costarring role, but details about her character remain a mystery. During the outdoor shoot, she looked healthy and not as thin as she has been in the past. She wore what looked like brown leather lace-up shorts, a simple black tank top and brown leather and zipper heels.

“Megan is hilarious,” Rudd told me last night at the Nylon Guys and WeSC party at Gjelina restaurant in Venice. “I don’t know if people don’t realize that, but she is really really funny.”

Fox’s comedic chops aside, I’d be remiss not to tell you what Rudd had to say when I asked him about wearing a long hair wig for his latest movie, Our Idiot Brother (out Aug. 26).

“I used to have long hair when I was 18 until about 22,” he said. “It wasn’t a hippie thing. I was hoping to look like Michael Hutchence from INXS. I pretty much didn’t cut my hair for four years.”

“Megan Fox is so funny,” she told us Monday night at the Los Angeles premiere of “The Change-Up.” “She’s hilarious. You wouldn’t, I don’t know if other people [expect it], but I think she’s really funny, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

So who does she play in the film?

“I can’t say that part,” she said with a smile, backing up her husband’s comments earlier this year regarding spoilers.

“The rest is a secret because it doesn’t come out until 2012 and if you already knew what it was about for a year and a half, you wouldn’t even want to see it,” he told us. “There will be people who are really interesting in the movie,” he teased. “And some familiar people who are in the movie.”

Why is all the press surrounding the new Transformers movie about Megan Fox, who isn’t even in the movie? Is this the studio’s plan?
—Junebug, Atlanta, via the inbox

It’s a delicious conspiracy theory, isn’t it? We imagine a smoky back room, filled with studio execs. They take a look at the final cut of Dark of the Moon, wail and moan as their eyes bleed out of their sockets, and then decide to market the whole mess by trashing franchise refugee Megan Fox.

So is this what happened? I asked around:

Likely, not.

Yes, by many accounts, this is not a good movie, even by blockbuster-sequel standards. It bows this week—but it’s gotten a stinky 39 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. CNN is calling it “lousy,” Rolling Stone warns that viewers run the risk of “dying a little inside,” and my buddy Garth Franklin at Dark Horizons went so far as to say that watching the film was like “being urinated upon.” The biggest complaint: that despite all the exploding robots, the story is just empty. There is no there, there.

Still, it’s unlikely that the studio behind the film orchestrated its marketing campaign around trashing Megan Fox. Publicists are evil, but they’re not, I am told, that evil.

“I think that it’s a little too much of a conspiracy theory,” posits Rachel Hill, a former personal publicist and the current director of marketing at American World Pictures, which is about to shoot a new Danny Glover film.

“I doubt that anything like that would be formally approved by any studio,” Scott Donaton of the marketing group Ensemble agrees.

That said, don’t be shocked if the movie’s principle star, Shia LaBeouf, did think through his Fox-trashing in advance, Hill says.

“Did Shia have to answer those questions about him and Megan Fox?” Hill notes. “Was it necessary? Maybe he did it to raise his profile a bit.

“I’ve had clients in the past who, when scandals have come out, we didn’t deny things. In fact we kept the scandal going because it kept our clients in the public eye.”

Now that’s a fun conspiracy theory.

Josh speaks out about Megan and how everyone misses her on the set.