Before she was starring in extremely cool, $200 million blockbusters and gracing the covers of magazines, Fox was stuck doing family-friendly sitcoms such as Hope & Faith. But don’t think this sexy starlet’s television days are over just yet.

Fox might be a 23-year-old millionaire former model, but she’s just like you and me when it comes to TV. OK, she’s out battling Decepticons while we’re pumping gas, but when she’s not home, Fox makes sure to DVR her favorite shows. At the top of the list are The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Paranormal State and Sober House. Fox says she leaves her living room flat-screen on VH1. “I watch all those reality shows like For the Love of Ray J and Bret Michaels’ show [Rock of Love],” she says. “It’s really bad for your brain. But I get sucked into them.”

So would we ever see Fox on a reality show? “I always said that if they were going to do a Dancing With The Stars charity celebrity edition, that I’d want to do it,” she says. “I think I could be pretty badass on that show. But it would have to be for charity. I would never take a paycheck for doing that.”

What Fox would take right now is more dramatic work. While she told me that she loves “making action movies, specifically ones based on comic books” (upcoming adaptations include Jonah Hex and Fathom), Fox did come across as someone who’s well aware that she got where she is today in large part because of her physical attractiveness, and she wants very much to be taken seriously. “My personal idea of success is to be able to really study and to develop my skills to the point where I can be recognized by my peers as a good actress. That’s really my end goal.”

One could say Fox is in a similar position to Johnny Depp circa late-1980s. After rising to stardom in the undercover cop TV series 21 Jump Street, Depp, now an Oscar-nominated actor, passed on countless heartthrob offers to work with visionary directors such as Tim Burton, who cast him in challenging roles, some of which obscured his distracting good looks and forced audiences to judge Depp on his acting merits alone. So I told her maybe what you need right now is an Edward Scissorhands. She laughs, incredulously. “Well, maybe not something so extreme!”