Shia Madness

There’s a dichotomy going on here. Unless it’s just what 21st century rascals look like. Shia LaBeouf’s angelic face, almost Paul Newmanesque in its arched-eyebrowed intensity, offers barely enough hair follicles for his attempt at a beard, and frequently erupts with rapid-fire enthusiasm for any conversation revolving around his current portfolio of passions. He chats like an eager-to-please freshman who will do anything to demonstrate his willingness to start climbing the American Dream ladder. Then we learn he drives a Nissan Maxima. He lives in a two-bedroomed house around the corner from his mother. He loves the LA Dodgers. He owns two dogs. Man, he even admits to liking Justin Timberlake. Any more ordinary and he could have run for vice president.

But then come the reported indiscretions that would already derail any serious attempt at public office. The young actor who is leading the Transformer franchise, now heading into the Jordanian desert to film portions of its second outing, Revenge Of The Fallen, has a CV of black marks that not even a conversion to evangelical Christianity could save him from a moral majority savaging.

In his teenage years he smoked weed with his heroin-addicted Vietnam Vet father as an attempt at bonding, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, seems drawn to car accidents, one of which smashed his left hand so badly that the injury had to be written into the script of Transformers II, and charges were brought, although ultimately dropped, after a late-night fight in Walgreens. For someone who has been described as the new Tom Hanks, and someone who is perhaps the future of the Indiana Jones franchise, it’s not exactly wholesome, Hallmark Channel, fun-for-all-the-family behaviour. Oh, and he had a lesbian beatnik grandmother – which you know Fox News would have a field day with.

But Shia LaBeouf is no study in clichéd excess that seems to have defined Colin Farrell – or Lindsay Lohan, for that matter – when they first descended in California. He doesn’t apologise for his mischievous side, doesn’t search for rehab-dwelling excuses for it, and doesn’t think it is remotely different to what three-quarters of his fresh-from-college peers do every Saturday night. “I don’t ever remember getting arrested sober,” he confesses. “I was always arrested drunk. It’s when I’m drinking that I don’t have the wherewithal to be able to realise the position of my life… It’s not something that is conducive to being a 
role model. No iconic actors that I know of have problems like that. And I don’t know how to do it like a gentleman. 
I don’t know how to have one drink.”

Well, at least he’s not blaming a dysfunctional family, an abusive priest, or the pressures of teenage fame. In fact, he can’t even claim that Hollywood is a new phenomenon at all. Born into a family of performers near Burbank, California, with a father who consumed rather too much of the hard stuff – and whatever hard stuff was going, by the way – and with early roles on the Disney Channel, there was never going to be the risk of Shia biting off rather more of Hollywood than he could stomach. He is just a passionate young man with talent, brains and the wholly normal desire to give both an alcohol-bathed rest once in a while. “Drinking and driving is one thing,” he now famously quipped on David Letterman, “but drinking and shopping... [that’s] just as bad.”

In a similar vein, he dismisses his father-son smoking sessions as “just a bad deal” and his late-night Walgreens transgression as “two hotheads, one completely in the wrong and one who wasn’t enjoying his job that night, going at it about minuscule bullsh*t.” Sitting with Shia, humble and courteous, it’s obvious which one is which. He likes a beer, sure, but he’s got some way to go before we’re talking about the new Charles Bukowski.

What you can say is that Shia is one of those people, and we all know one, to whom things just keep happening. In addition to self-inflicted mishaps, he was struck in the face by a prop while shooting Transformers, a wound just above the eye that required stitches, and was actually arrested for smoking in an unauthorised place – an occupational hazard in California, admittedly – and then, more predictably, there’s the succession of rumours linking him to A-list 
celebs such as Rihanna, and maybe even her umbrella.

“I’m enjoying myself,” he said of the connection, before launching into another everyman slice of self-deprecation. “But I’m not great with women. I’m not a closer. No way. I can chat all night long, but I’m not the guy who goes, ‘Okay, back to my room.’ I’ve never been that way, I just can’t do it.” Well, however he managed it, he’s been seeing model Lauren Hastings for the past six months. That dichotomy again. Sympathy over, Shia.

So, Shia LeBeouf is a good-looking kid from a slightly unorthodox, highly artistic, Californian family, part Cajun, part Jewish, who seems to be tip-toeing his way to fame the right way – by making movies people seem to want to watch. Gaining traction in small-scale projects such as Holes (2003) and Project Greenlight (2004), he landed small roles in big movies like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), I, Robot (2004) and as an LSD-tripping frat boy in the outstanding Bobby (2006). After starring in The Greatest Game Ever Played – a Seabiscuit for golf, basically – he then lead the cast of A Guide to Recognising Your Saints, playing NOX 27’s cover star Robert Downey Jr’s younger character as an 1980s adolescent growing up in a roughhouse neighbourhood of Queens – a role that he chose, he said, to break out of the Disney straightjacket by allowing him to “curse as much as possible”.

As stellar as his performance was as teenage Dito Montiel, it was the more mainstream Disturbia – an underwhelming homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window – that turned the big guns his way. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as “the best young actor in Hollywood”, while the New York Daily News offered a comparison with John Cusack. The fact that he survived the modest critical reaction demonstrated that the star was emerging from the cocoon of promise.

“You don’t believe the good stuff, you don’t believe the bad stuff, you just don’t believe any of it,” he says of the mounting praise. “It’s all a big game. This is like a joke, man. This stuff is all magical and fun, but at the end of the day, I see it and it’s fantastic and I’m honoured by it, but I can’t buy into it. If I ever do, then I know when I go on to forums I’d read things like, ‘F**k that piece of sh*t. He’s a f**king loser.’

“I’m not like a celebrity or star. I’m an actor. Jon Voight always said don’t read any of it. Enjoy yourself.”
Considering the fame “thing” has probably never been more difficult, it’s a reasonable philosophy. An entire sub-industry has developed around the lives of celebrities, with magazines pushing gotcha shots of beautiful people with – gasp! – a plastic bag of groceries.

But he knows where to draw the line. It’s a line that’s shaped very much like Paris Hilton. “She’s not an actress,” he says, trying not to sound too dismissive as he does so. “She’s a professional personality. There’s two different routes to this: you can be a personality or you can be an actor. You can’t do both. Look at 70s actors like Dustin Hoffman when he’s going from The Graduate to Midnight Cowboy, then he was doing Papillon, and then he was in Kramer vs Kramer. You don’t know anything about him which is why you buy him in all these roles. Paris Hilton can’t play anything but Paris Hilton. I guess there’s an audience. That’s why she’s successful. That’s why people still read that.
“But I can be honest with you and be truthful and tell you about my life,” he adds, suggesting that even a film-based interview is a form of acting, “but there are just certain opinions I have that I can’t express here. Talk about Paris Hilton, I can go off on that for 30 minutes.”

Shia LeBeouf’s recent film choices, though, will see him firmly entrenched in A-list territory – from which it might be very difficult to emerge unscathed. From Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to the twin outings in Transformers, he is prime cereal box fodder, an action figure in various guises. He was even surprised to learn the depth of Transformers fans’ obsession with the low-rent car-cum-robot 80s TV series. “It was a cheesy cartoon!” he exclaims. “It was never what it is now… it’s becoming very serious. There’s a whole lingo and the people who are into it are into it. They have Decepticon back logos, tattoos all over the place, arm pieces… You don’t see people getting Pirates of the Caribbean Jack Sparrow on their back. They take the Ford symbol off their car and replace it with an Autobot symbol.”

Moving seamlessly into Indiana Jones and Transformers, it seems that having fun was a prime concern. And why not? He’s living a boy’s own adventure, reveling in teenage fantasies and getting paid handsomely for it. Crafting your art in a Boston repertory company is overrated; especially when you can blow things up for your day job. “We built the robots, we blew stuff up,” he smiles. “There’s stuff we could’ve done on green screen but the way that [Michael] Bay works, and the way he works with actors… he goes to such lengths to put his actors in situations that are dangerous so he can get their reaction and their response. You can easily go to green screen and fake me being on the Orpheum Theatre, blowing the roof up, hanging by one hand while my feet are on fire. But he actually took us to the Orpheum Theatre, blew the Orpheum Theatre up, lit my feet on fire...”

Shia LaBeouf has a tattoo on his wrist. It’s a timeline that begins with his birth and ends in 2004. He says he had it done to remind himself that a lot of actors’ or celebrities’ youth disappears in a blur of adult-fed publicity, and that he had a childhood, and that every moment has to be cherished for what it is – not for what it might lead to. “It’s just kind of precautionary. I’ll never forget it ’cause it’s right there,” he says.

But with robots and cars and adventure stories, there’s probably little chance of his growing up too fast. And as his father offered him weed at 11, maybe he’s going through childhood in reverse. He is even thinking about college. He was accepted into Yale, and was toying with studying psychology. He has another tattoo on his chest that depicts a cage, which he believes is an accurate reflection of the actor’s lot – stardom is just another kind of prison, no matter how comfortable the cells. He even feels slightly uneasy, oddly enough, because he doesn’t actually think he’s that attractive. “People who are beautiful have a tendency to be over the top and exuberant and open. They have a comfort zone in their visuals, whereas I don’t. I’m very uncomfortable all 
the time, which makes for good comedy.”
We just hope he continues to see the funny side.

A full version of this article is available in NOX 28