Fans of Megan Fox have had to exercise patience: The actress, by her own admission, doesn’t work much. “I’ve never made more than two movies a year,” she said. Her recent arc on the Fox series “New Girl,” was, then, an unexpected treat, and she will reappear next season, she said, as a love interest and sharp-tongued comic foil. And she returns as April, the adventurous reporter and stalwart buddy in the sequel “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” out on Friday, June 3.

A case of bronchitis caused her to miss the premiere in New York, where the movie was filmed, but Ms. Fox spoke afterward by phone from Los Angeles about her unambitious career path and her working relationship with the producer and director Michael Bay, who first propelled her to stardom in “Transformers,” and is behind the “Turtles” movies. As a mother of two young sons, with a third child on the way (with the actor Brian Austin Green), Ms. Fox, 30, long ago gave up playing Halo, but she still gravitates toward the fantasy universe. “If I got sent 10 scripts and one of them was for an action or sci-fi or gaming movie, that’s the first one I’m gonna read,” she said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Is it important for you to play women who are both strong and physically attractive?

I don’t get a whole lot of say in terms of character development on movies like these. It’s not like I’m in there helping them write the script saying, “April should do this, because this is what a real feminist would do.” In terms of what’s available for women to play in general in Hollywood, it’s pretty scarce. You have these stereotypes that still dominate films: the nag, the trophy, the escort. [Laughs.] I haven’t been sent a nag script yet, but I do get plenty of, like, “interesting stripper.” Or, “She’s super funny, but she’s also an escort, but that’s what makes it funny!”

Would you rather have more say?

[On “Ninja Turtles”] if I had said, I feel like my integrity is being compromised wearing this schoolgirl uniform, they would listen to that, of course. But that wasn’t something that affected me in a negative way at all. On a movie like this, I don’t mind doing [the scene] as written, but I do do a lot of improv. I’m sort of a rapid-fire ballsy talker, and so I bring that to the character whenever it’s appropriate to the scene. That never makes it in.