I read this June 14, 2009 published interview by Dotson Rader of Shia LaBeouf. And it revealed a lot about the young actor:
'Sometimes I feel I’m living a meaningless life,” Shia LaBeouf says, “and I get frightened.”
The 23-year-old actor is sitting with me at a cheap outdoor café next to a parking strip in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. It is a hot afternoon, and he is sweating and drinking iced tea. He wears faded chinos, an old T-shirt, washed-out sneakers, and a baseball cap he got free from Kawasaki. He sports sunglasses and a new beard. He looks like a teenage day laborer on a break between shifts.
“I know I’m one of the luckiest dudes in America right now,” LaBeouf says. “I have a great house. My parents don’t have to work. I’ve got money. I’m famous. But it could all change, man. It could go away. You never know.”
Shia LaBeouf (pronounced SHY-uh La-BUFF) is the biggest box-office star of his generation. His new movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is expected to push the worldwide total of his film grosses over $3 billion. Despite his success, LaBeouf had to ride his bike to the café because his driver’s license is suspended. His left hand is broken, bandaged in a gray plastic brace.
“Last July, I got in a car accident, and my truck flipped three times and landed on my hand,” he explains, raising his injured hand to show me. “It was smashed so bad, it didn’t even look like a hand. See the knuckle of my middle finger, the phalanx?” He rubs the knuckle. “There’s no bone left in there currently. And to fix this other finger, they took bone out of my hip. They’ll take out more bone to fix another finger.”
It was the third minor run-in LaBeouf has had with the authorities. When he refused to take a substance test after the accident, he was cited for a misdemeanor DUI and temporarily lost his right to drive.
“I know if it all went away, I’d be fine,” he asserts, affecting a smart-ass, street-punk bravado. “Kipling says, ‘If you can risk it all in one turn of the pitch-and-toss...’ I feel that way.”
He could very well lose everything, as other young stars have, his career wrecked by self-indulgence and arrogance. LaBeouf comes from an unconventional family with a history of addiction. He is aware, he says, of how disproportionate movie success is to actual achievement and how easy it is to be overwhelmed by a skyrocketing career.
“I don’t handle fame well,” LaBeouf says. “Most actors on most days don’t think they’re worthy. I have no idea where this insecurity comes from, but it’s a God-sized hole. If I knew, I’d fill it, and I’d be on my way.”
When LaBeouf is feeling insecure, he sometimes stops his bike on the side of a busy road to see if people passing by recognize him. He is scared that they won’t.
“Actors live dependent on being validated by other people’s opinions,” he explains. “I don’t understand what it is I do that people want. I don’t know what an actor does. I have no credentials. I don’t know what I’m doing. To my mind, talent doesn’t really exist. Talent is like a card player’s luck. It is motivation, ambition, and luck. It’s just a drive to be the best. I think acting is a con game.”
The con game has made LaBeouf millions. His movies include Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Disturbia, Holes, and 2007’s Transformers. The Transformers sequel is certain to be another smash for him. It opens June 24.
“I don’t give a damn about the money anymore,” LaBeouf says. “I used to. Money is the reason I became an actor.”
LaBeouf grew up dirt-poor in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles—the once-violent and drug-infested neighborhood where actor Leonardo DiCaprio also was raised. Like DiCaprio, he was an only child in one of the few white families living in the largely Latino area. “It sort of made me a target,” he recalls. “But I never felt poor, because I didn’t know anything else.
“I come from hippies,” he says proudly. “My dad was a wandering dude recovering from the war in Vietnam. And my mom, before she met him, had a head shop in Brooklyn. Bob Dylan used to come in and smoke weed. All her furniture hung upside-down from the ceiling. She was out of her mind. It was the 1970s.”
Part of what LaBeouf remembers is that in 1988, when he was 2, his dad began dressing him up as a clown and putting him to work shilling for the family’s pushcart business.
“It was a hustle. We’d walk around the neighborhood in full clown regalia,” he recalls. “My embarrassment factor didn’t exist. I had fun, because I knew that in the middle of a performance my parents couldn’t fight. So, for sure, every day, there had to be some peaceful time for us, or we weren’t going to make it through the week financially.
“I’m still doing the same hustle now,” he continues. “The only change is that, instead of my dad selling hot dogs from the cart, it’s Steven Spielberg selling the hot dogs.” Spielberg has been the producer of LaBeouf’s major films.
LaBeouf stops talking and waves his arm in the air to ask the waitress for more iced tea. As he does, I notice a tattoo on the underside of his left wrist. It reads: 1986–2004 and resembles the numbers tattooed on concentration-camp inmates. His grandfather, after whom LaBeouf is named, was a Polish Holocaust survivor, so I ask about it.
“Yeah, it looks like a Holocaust tattoo,” he replies. “But they put my grandfather’s number above his chest, up here,” he points toward his shoulder, “on the right side. My tattoo is on my wrist. It’s there for me to remember my childhood.”
In 1996, LaBeouf’s parents ended their turbulent marriage, and he turned to stand-up comedy as a way to make money. He talked his way into gigs at local L.A. comedy clubs. He was 10. Today, he still supports his parents.
“My humor came from seeing my parents have sex, smoke weed, my mom being naked—just weird hippie stuff, twisted R-rated humor,” he says. “I’d get up there in my OshKosh B’Gosh outfit and my bowl haircut. I was a little kid with a Lenny Bruce mouth. That was the act. But there’s no money in stand-up comedy, so I went into acting.”
At 11, he found an agent, Teresa Dahlquist, in the Yellow Pages and phoned her, pretending to be the British manager of a hot young actor named Shia LaBeouf. Impressed by his gumption, she signed him as a client, drove him to auditions, and paid his rent. She remains his agent.
“She became one of the few pillars in my life,” LaBeouf says. “She lifted me up and cared for me. She said, ‘Hey, kid, see that mountain? Go move it!’”
Move it he did. Within a year he was cast on the Disney Channel’s teen show Even Stevens, which brought him three seasons of work and an Emmy. His dad, by then in AA, was paid by Disney to be his chaperone. They lived together in a motel for three years.
After Even Stevens was canceled in 2003, LaBeouf landed his first movie, Holes, an unexpected hit. Steven Spielberg saw it with his kids and, three years later, made LaBeouf the star of Disturbia and the first Transformers film.
LaBeouf in person is foul-mouthed, resentful, funny, prickly, quick-witted, and charming—a package of contradictions. He has a wide, boyish smile and enormous hazel eyes that telegraph his every thought.
“Acting is instinctual,” he says. “The good actors are all screwed up. They’re all in pain. It’s a profession of bottom-feeders and heartbroken people.”
LaBeouf is among the latter. His big romantic heartache came with the end of his three-year love affair with China Brezner, the daughter of a producer, in late 2007. He still seems not to have recovered from the blow, although he has dated other women since.
“China is a beautiful woman,” he tells me. “She is the best. She is fantastic!”
I ask why they broke up.
“Maybe it was career pressure,” he answers. “Maybe I chose work. Every man has those feelings of escape and survival. I know you shouldn’t be that way. I’m trying to understand it and find the answers. I don’t have them now. Like other 23-year-old guys, I’m normal and I’m fallible.”
He stops and thinks.
“Why did the love of my life and I break up?” he asks, puzzled. “Man, I have no idea. What was that all about? I have no answers to anything. None. Why am I an alcoholic? I haven’t a damn clue! What is life about? I don’t know.”
He shakes his head and smiles his movie-star grin.
“What I do know is, I screw up, and I know that I’m working on myself to be a better person,” he says. “So I have no apologies. The best I can do is learn from my mistakes and move forward. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”
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