Megan Fox extras! More from our cover girl

For our March cover story, W traveled to snowy Santa Fe, New Mexico for a whirlwind one-day shoot and half-hour sit-down with Megan Fox. Despite having worked nights on her most recent film, Passion Play, and fighting a cold, Fox was characteristically frank about her new job in fashion—Armani campaign model—and living life in the Hollywood bubble.

Well, it’s completely non-sensical. It operates—it’s its own monster and there are no laws to it. There’s no logic. And that’s interesting to me. I couldn’t survive in it, I couldn’t do it as my job, I couldn’t live in it everyday. It would make me crazy. You have so many brilliant people who are artistically gifted operating on these high levels of adrenaline everyday. I like to admire it from afar.

On the two types of people who struggle in Hollywood: One type is the type that’s incredibly gifted and on a level where they’re operating as geniuses artistically, and there’s a line between artistic genius and crazy and its very razor thin. And you have those people who get very confused living in Hollywood for many years, it fucks with you. And then you have a totally different kind of person who gets sucked into it and manipulated by it and bulldozed by it. I feel like I’ve always been able to be really objective. I’ve always been on the outside, even of myself. So that allows me to not get too affected by it. It hasn’t destroyed my life yet.

I work privately with some charities but I am not ready to come out and say, hey guys, I do charity, look at me. I just feel like its no longer charity if my image is somehow benefiting from it—I feel like I’m exploiting these people. I know that the argument is that you’re supposed to use your celebrity to encourage others to do good, and I get that. But I think there will be a time and a place for that and right now I’d rather keep it private.

On managing her low self-esteem and “self-loathing”: I choose very private moments to let it out. I’ve grown up with it, so its not like all of a sudden I’m suffering from depression or something that is unfamiliar to me. I’ve had it my whole life. It just is a part of my personality. I don’t ever do anything and go, “That was awesome. You did a good job.” I look at photos of myself and think, “Wow, I looked really gorgeous that night!” Or, “This working out is really paying off!” I never, ever, ever think that. There’s a million and one things that I’ve fallen short on all of the time in my mind. And you can’t—there’s not really a way to manage that, unless you want to go on meds, which I don’t need to do. I just drink a lot of green tea and meditate at night.

Check out our video from the set of the Megan Fox shoot.