Michael Bay has cast UK model (and Jason Statham's latest squeeze) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Shia LaBeouf's new love interest in Transformers 3.

In case you're not familiar with the 23-year-old model, she came to prominence on the 'net through a shoot for the Pirelli calendar with Terry Richardson and this Agent Provocateur advert/mini movie (slightly NSFW):



Bay met Huntington-Whiteley when they shot this ad together for Victoria's Secret last year:




"YOU'RE HIRED"

It comes as no surprise that the director decided to replace Megan Fox in the film franchise. Fox made little secret of her feelings about Bay, comparing him to Hitler in an interview with Wonderland Magazine and saying that he was "abusive" during filming.

Bay responded in an interview with The Wall Street Journal saying:

"Well, that's Megan Fox for you. She says some very ridiculous things because she's 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do. You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, "Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it." But I 100% disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in "Armageddon." Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did "Transformers"-and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from "Bad Boys." Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in "Transformers." I like to think that I've had some luck in building actors' careers with my films."

To top it off, it seems the crew weren't that wrapped with Fox either. Apparently a few of them got together and wrote an open letter on the Transformers website calling Fox "dumb as a rock" and that she's the "queen of talking trailer trash and posing like a porn star," not to mention "grumpy" and "thankless, classless, graceless." Bay promptly removed the letter but you can read the entire thing over at this dickhead's site.

Huntington-Whiteley will join a pretty eclectic cast for the third movie. Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and Patrick Dempsey (McDreamy? Really?) have all signed on for the third installment.

It'll be interesting to see how Huntington-Whiteley goes on the big screen. While she doesn't have a proven acting track record, we're still glad she got the role over Heidi Montag (thanks to our mate Dave from Pop Mag for bringing this audition tape to our attention).