TV & Movies
A Megan Fox “Breakup” Text Inspired Machine Gun Kelly’s Movie Good Mourning
The stoner comedy “came from a gnarly spiral.”
Megan Fox doesn’t just have a role in the stoner comedy Good Mourning — she’s the reason it exists. Her fiancé, Machine Gun Kelly, and his collaborator Mod Sun (real names: Colson Baker and Derek Ryan Smith, respectively) made sure to celebrate her for inadvertently inspiring the movie at its Los Angeles premiere on Thursday, May 12. As Sun shared in a speech, he and Kelly came up with the idea for Good Mourning after MGK thought Fox had broken up with him via text message.
“I want to say thank you to you for sending me that text,” he said, first to MGK before acknowledging Fox. “And thank you to Megan for sending him a text that made him think that she was breaking up with him when she was actually probably just being really nice and saying she loves [him].”
Kelly, Fox, and the crowd laughed as Sun explained the misunderstanding. “We all know how this guy’s mind works,” he said of MGK. “Spiral. Spiral! So thank you for the catastrophe that happened that made this movie real.”
MGK described the project in almost the same way, telling The Hollywood Reporter that it “came from a gnarly spiral.” He got the text in question from Fox early on in their relationship, when she was leaving to shoot a film for three weeks and would be without cellphone service. (They began dating in May 2020, so the timeline seems to point to her Big Gold Brick shoot in Canada.)
“I was just stuck, like, sitting there trying to decode this text. And it was like the Da Vinci Code,” Kelly told Variety at the Good Mourning premiere. “I went to all these places, like what does this mean? What does this mean? And everyone I was getting relationship advice from wasn’t in a relationship. So it just led me down a long, dark, terrible road.”
That road did give him and Sun the chance to fill “a void for the next generation” — namely, a lack of stoner comedies — as Kelly told THR. They already had a 150-page script by the time Fox got back from her trip, and it told the story of a movie star reexamining his life after getting what he thinks is a breakup text from his girlfriend. And yes, there’s a lot of Kelly in him.
“A huge part of that character that you’re watching in the movie is me in real life,” Kelly told Variety. “Like, I am very kind of a boyish, lost, sweet kid at heart and I feel like the world kind of makes me kind of harden up and feel like I have to defend myself.”
As for Fox, she plays his roommate in the film, but in real life, she’s clearly a lot more than that. The two got engaged in January, so barring any other text misunderstandings, they’re looking at forever together.
