Megan Fox named as next April O’Neil in Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles movie

Actor Megan Fox will play April O’Neil in an upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film produced by Michael Bay.

Bay made the announcement on his website Friday, saying “TMNT: we are bringing Megan Fox back into the family!”

The film is to be directed by Jonathan Liebesman, director of Wrath of the Titans.

The news came as a surprise to observes, as Bay and Fox have had a tumultuous relationship in the past. Fox stared in Bay’s first two Transformers films, roles which cemented her rise to fame. She was replaced with British model Rosie Huntington-Whitele in the third film in 2011.

In a 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fox said of her performance in Transformers: “I’m terrible in it. It’s my first real movie and it’s not honest and not realistic. The movie wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t proud about what I did.”

She also compared Bay to both Hitler and Napoleon and said he was “a nightmare to work with” in an interview with Britain’s Wonderland magazine.

In 2011, GQ published an article about why Fox was removed from the third Transformers film, which quoted Bay as saying that: “She was in a different world, on her BlackBerry” and that Steven Spielberg advised him to fire Fox.

It appears, however, that the two were able to put their differences behind them for the good of the turtles.