Isabela Moner Had A Weird And Funny Audition For Transformers: The Last Knight

Michael Bay and Isabela Moner

Auditioning for a Transformers movie sounds exciting. It also sounds weird. That's to be expected, though. As much as the movie exists in Michael Bay's brain, it still takes months (even years) or post-production under the watchful eye of the geniuses at ILM to bring the director's ultimate vision to life. But at the base level, there's a lot of pretend. "Make-pretend," as Mark Wahlberg called it in our exclusive interview. And a lot of screaming at things that aren't really there. Isabela Moner makes her franchise debut in Transformers: The Last Knight, and she described her unusual audition for the latest Bay as such:

[Michael Bay] made me go into the parking lot, look up at the building and start yelling at it as if it was a Transformer. Like Megatron, or something. And he was recording it, like making a mini movie. ... This was the callback! This was my first time meeting him. The first day, and we were already doing weird stuff that doesn't make sense! But yeah, it was great! It kind of set the tone for the rest of the adventure.

Please let that clip end up on the eventual Blu-ray of Transformers: The Last Knight. Because we have become so accustomed to the refined polish of the high-tech Transformers franchise, I think it would be delightfully homegrown to see the movie stripped down to the acting essence of a young performer yelling at a building because she imagines that it's a skyscraper-sized Decepticon.

Megan Fox's Transformers audition is still floating around out there:

That worked out for her for at least two Transformers movies!

In Transformers: The Last Knight, Isabela Moner plays young Izabella, a street-smart Chicago girl whose life was disrupted by the Autobot and Decepticon battle from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. She befriends two robots named Sqweeks and Canopy, and eventually joins Cade Yeager (Mark Waholberg) on his quest to find out WHY the Transformers keep returning to Earth to do their battles. Here's Moner discussing her audition process with CinemaBlend:

Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth chapter in the ongoing saga, and it might be Michael Bay and Mark Wahlberg's last. However, Isabela Moner could carry the torch for future Transformers movies, and the producers behind the films have plans in place for spinoffs and sequels for years to come. See The Last Knight when it opens in theaters on June 20, and come back all week for more of our interviews with the movie's cast and crew.

Sean O'Connell
Managing Editor

Sean O’Connell is a journalist and CinemaBlend’s Managing Editor. Having been with the site since 2011, Sean interviewed myriad directors, actors and producers, and created ReelBlend, which he proudly cohosts with Jake Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy. And he's the author of RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT, the Spider-Man history book WITH GREAT POWER, and an upcoming book about Bruce Willis.