Brian Austin Green says Megan Fox was ‘breath of fresh air’ after Vanessa Marcil relationship

Not long after Brian Austin Green had a child with Vanessa Marcil in 2002, he found himself in a relationship with another actress, Megan Fox.

The Beverly Hills, 90210 alum says that Fox was “a breath of fresh air, coming out of “what felt like Vietnam to me.” Green spoke about his past during Monday’s episode of his podcast, Oldish.

He dated Marcil, his costar on the later seasons of 90210, from the late ’90s until 2003. Their son, Cassius, was born in 2002.

By 2004, he and Fox had coupled up and were together much of the time until 2020. They welcomed three sons before they split after a decade of marriage.

Green also shares Zane Walker, born in June 2022, with current fiancée Sharna Burgess, whom he danced with on Dancing With the Stars in 2021.

“The relationship that I had with Vanessa, it was very toxic,” Green said. “It wasn’t a loving, caring relationship.”

Green, who played David Silver on the original 90210, described trouble with women that included his earliest relationship.

“My mom was, almost to the point of smothering, like she just loved me so much. You see her with the kids now,” he said to his cohosts, who included Burgess, with whom he shares 2-year-old son Zane. “To a fault sometimes, just everything was about me. And then with Vanessa, it was not that at all, but it was masked in this is a relationship where that absolutely exists, so you start thinking like Oh, it’s just kind of a new version, like, Oh she loves me, but this is her way of loving me.”

He described trying to tell himself that a new way of loving was okay.

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“She’s trying to help me and fix me and get me through things,” Green described thinking. “And then after two years or so, you’re kind of looking at yourself in the mirror, and you’re like, Who am I at this point? There’s not one piece of me that’s left. My relationship with everyone around me has changed.”

Green noted, too, that having Cassius, his first child, was “by far the first time in my life where I just stepped outside of myself a little bit.” Things “didn’t carry the same weight that they did before,” he said.

Green “absolutely loved being a parent,” he said. “I think that was the first time in my life where I really felt like, ‘this is what I’m supposed to be doing.'”

Watch the full conversation above.