City madman: how Shia LaBeouf became the main madman of Hollywood from a genius actor
'23.02.2021'
Source: Lenta.ru
Hollywood star Shia LaBeouf again found herself at the center of a scandal - this time his former lover, singer FKA twigs, accused the actor of emotional abuse and sued him. LaBeouf has been in public trouble more than once or twice. The loudest antics of the artist and how they ended, recalls Lenta.ru.
"My father gave me my first joint when I was 11"
Shia LaBeouf was born in 1986 into a poor family. LaBeouf called his parents real hippies - his father, Geoffrey, a Vietnam veteran, constantly changed jobs and abused alcohol and drugs, and his Jewish mother, Sheina, owned a headshop in Brooklyn before meeting her husband. Bob Dylan... The first acting "job" went to Shaya at the age of only two - his father dressed him up in a clown costume and made him attract buyers while he was selling from a bicycle cart. “We walked around the neighbors all in clown clothes. I didn’t feel ashamed, I had fun, because I knew that while I was acting, my parents would not quarrel, ”said LaBeouf.
The first clash with the police at Shaya happened in elementary school when he was only nine - he was caught stealing sneakers. The next arrest followed two years later, when LaBeouf tried to steal a gameboy from a store. From the age of ten he acted as a stand-up comedian in various clubs. Shia later described his material as greasy for his age - "as if a fifty-year-old man was broadcasting through a schoolboy."
“My sense of humor comes from the fact that I saw my parents having sex, [using] marijuana, I saw my mother naked - all these weird hippie things, such perverted adult humor,” he said Shia LaBeouf.
“I grew up working in stand-up and it was the best thing that happened to me in my life. I moved out of my parents' house, then it was very tragic. My father was on heroin and did some kind of game, after which he ended up in a rehabilitation institution. Mom tried to keep us afloat, but she couldn't. And stand-up became a salvation. He saved both my life and my family, ”said Shia.
LaBeouf's parents subsequently divorced. As the only child in the family, he maintained close relations with both his mother and his father, a drug addict, with whom he recalled his life together: “Drugs were everywhere - marijuana, cocaine, heroin. My father gave me my first joint when I was about 11 or 12 years old. "
LaBeouf decided to start his acting career as a teenager, when he realized that film actors in general get a lot more stand-up comedians. He found himself an agent, and he knocked out the beginning actor for cameo roles in sitcoms and comedies. A real breakthrough for Shia was his participation in the Disney television series "Light Up with the Stevens" - thanks to his role in the children's sitcom, 14-year-old LaBeouf has established himself as a serious aspiring actor, ready for a big movie. The show ended in 2003, and Shia soon began appearing in blockbusters. In 2004, he starred in the action movie "I, Robot" with Will Smith, and in 2005 played the main role in the biographical sports film "Triumph" and played in "Constantine: Lord of Darkness" with Keanu Reeves.
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The stress of working at large film studios, however, revealed the young actor's very aggressive nature: in 2005, he got into the first public conflict with the participation of the police, when he flared up over a neighbor who refused to give way in a car. LaBeouf first drove into someone else's car, and later came to the abuser's house, brandishing a knife. Shaya was detained by the police, but this strange scandal did not interfere with his career - already in 2007, a film with his participation "Paranoia" (a youth interpretation of "Window to the Courtyard") was released, as well as the first tape of the "Transformers" franchise by Michael Bay, the main role in which she made 21-year-old LaBeouf a world famous star. The actor is praised by critics, Vanity Fair dubs him "The Next Tom Hanks".
With the advent of fame, Shia decides to radically change his image, throwing off the label of "eternal boy". In an interview, he admits that he wants to try himself in different roles at all costs and is afraid to remain an actor in one role.
“I want to instill fear. I want to be ... a killer, "- said Shia LaBeouf at the age of 21.
"Why am I an alcoholic?"
However, the change in image did not mean that the actor would give up antisocial antics. In the same 2007, being drunk, he went to the store three times to buy cigarettes - the actor constantly forgot to do this, because of a collision with a security guard, strange thoughts came to him that he needed to change clothes to enter the store again. Then the artist himself decided to run into the security, was pacified and handed over to the police. A year later, Shia with a laugh retells this ridiculous story on the show. David Letterman... Then, in 2008, the film was released Steven Spielberg "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" starring LaBeouf.
Shia, by his own admission, believed that filming with Spielberg would be the peak of his career, but working with the cult director turned out to be a complete disappointment for him.
“I grew up thinking that if you get to Spielberg, then there is nowhere else. But you get there and realize that this is not Spielberg from your dreams, this is Spielberg in a completely different stage of his creativity. He is no longer a director, but a ****** [bloody] company, ”the actor later complained.
According to Shaya, he hates his films, made with the participation of Spielberg.
By this time, LaBeouf's clashes with the law were already becoming regular. In the year Indiana Jones was released, the 22-year-old artist was involved in an accident in Hollywood, injuring his arm. He refused to do an alcohol and drug test and was detained by the police. In 2009, the actor for the first time publicly admitted that he had problems with drinking. True, from the same speech it was clear that LaBeouf was not going to do anything about it.
“Why am I an alcoholic? I have no fucking clue! What is the general meaning of life? I don’t know, ”he said Shia LaBeouf at the age of 23 years.
Years later, LaBeouf will explain that in his youth he was attracted to the image of a drunken daredevil, and he tried to support it consciously: “Part of it was posturing. I never knew how to drink. I never did, but I knew I needed to drink - I had a strange postmodern delight with goners. When I met Robert Downey Jr., I thought, “Wow, you have this texture. How can I be the same? ”"
"I wanted him to be afraid of me"
With the onset of the 2010s, LaBeouf decides that he is cramped in leading roles in blockbuster action movies, and switches to more independent projects - takes on a role in "Nymphomaniac" Lars von Trier, takes part in the Broadway play "Orphans" with Alec Baldwin and makes his own short film. True, all these projects turned into trouble for him. But if in the case of "Nymphomaniac" the scandal was personal (because of the bed scenes in the picture, his then beloved Carolyn Fo broke up with him), the other two presented LaBeouf to the public in a rather unpleasant light.
From the Broadway play, Shia was fired in disgrace after he attacked Baldwin during rehearsal. The actor himself said that he simply got used to the role too much. According to him, they took a dislike to each other from the very first rehearsal.
“Baldwin and I butted violently. I had my own technique, I slept in the park, woke up and came to rehearsals. I was scared to participate in the play, and I learned it by heart even before the first run. And my goal was to piss Baldwin ***** [fucking hell]. This was my role, my acting job. And I didn't want it to look fake. I wanted him to be afraid of me. And for three weeks I tried to achieve this, ”he said.
They hurried to get rid of the insane actor, but this did not stop Shaya - after the dismissal, which the artist took too close to his heart, he never left the role. LaBeouf began to watch Baldwin outside the theater and chase him home.
“I was completely destroyed and I was still in the role. I didn't know what to do. I started boxing. I tried to distract myself from the play, but could not. So I chased him from theater to home. I needed some kind of completion, ”the actor confessed in an interview.
LaBeouf's short film HowardCantour.com, which premiered in Cannes in 2012, has received surprisingly positive reviews from prominent film critics. The general public, however, turned out to be more thoughtful - plagiarism was found in Chailly's work (or even so - Chailly's work turned out to be a very detailed adaptation with the replacement of the author by Chaia himself) of Daniel Close's graphic novel Justin M. Damiano.
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The plagiarism scandal unfolded when LaBeouf was filming the military action adventure Fury with Brad Pitt... Film director David Ayer Then he advised the roped actor to ride the hate wave and turn everything into a metaironic performance - to publicly apologize for the theft, using the apologies of other celebrities. From that moment on, a new period began in LaBeouf's (it seems, generally unsinkable) career - the artist imagined himself to be an actionist artist.
"I drink and feel less"
The artist became friends with conceptual artists Nastya Ronkko and Luke Turner, who advised him to come to the Berlin premiere of Nymphomaniac in February 2014 with a paper bag on his head with the inscription “I am no longer famous”. In the summer of that year, the artist again finds himself in the center of a scandal due to his drunken appearance in public. Shia turned up at a bar in New York to watch a World Cup soccer match and began to eat whiskey.
Later that evening, he began to molest a homeless man on the street (he ran away from a drunken Shaya, and the artist began to chase him), went to a Broadway show, where he became attached to two 50-year-old spectators (he was impatient to treat his neighbors in a row of whiskey), began to smoke during the performance and grabbed the artist's ass. During the intermission, he was invited to the street, saying that there was another party going on there - however, a police squad was waiting in front of the LaBeouf theater. He was taken to the police station, where he continued to smoke badly - tore off his shirt and spat at the policeman. As a result, he had to spend the day in a straitjacket in a solitary confinement cell.
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The actor will later cheerfully tell about all this on the show. Jimmy Kimmel - the situation will almost completely repeat the scandal with his arrest in the store in 2007, after which LaBeouf, too, joyfully and artistically retold his misadventures on television. In another interview, he will explain what happened with the "Napoleon complex": "I drink and feel less than I am and become louder than I should be."
The second half of the 2010s for LaBeouf is the time of regular performances. All these strange projects had two things in common - each had a hashtag in the name, and they were all to one degree or another dedicated to Shaya's ego. As part of the #IAmSorry (“I'm sorry”) project, he invited strangers to stay alone with him in a Los Angeles gallery and interact in some way while the actor himself sat in a tuxedo and with a paper bag on his head (the authors of the action called it “reflections on popularity and vulnerability ").
The performance #AllMyMovies (“All My Films”) consisted of Shaya's continuous viewing of films with his participation (the process took three days, everything that happened was broadcast on the Internet). LaBeouf published his phone number, urging everyone to call him or his associates as part of the #Touchmysoul (Touch my soul) campaign. He also rode the elevator for 24 hours in one of the high-rise buildings in Oxford, calling it #Elevate.
During the #TakeMeAnywhere project (“Take me anywhere”), LaBeouf, along with Ronkko and Turner, went on a 30-day hiking trip, inviting fans to catch him and take him wherever they want (the performance went quite calmly for the actor - he, for example , went to a baseball game, went fishing and had a great vacation in general).
During this time period, LaBeouf also managed to star in the low-budget masterpiece "American Cutie", and also to marry the British actress Mia Goth and divorce her. Shia met the artist on the set of Nymphomaniac, they got married in 2016, and in 2018 it became known about their divorce.
The loudest and most scandalous artistic action of this period was the project He Will Not Divide Us in 2017. A performance against the newly elected US President Donald Trump, turned into a prolonged and hysterical confrontation of LaBeouf to users of the anonymous imageboard 4chan, who repeatedly disrupted his action. Shia even ended up in the police force again, attacking a hater who told him that "Hitler did nothing wrong." As a result, the actor, apparently tired from the obviously losing fight with Internet trolls, simply locked himself in a hut in Lapland for a month. But, of course, this act of his was also announced as a performance with a hashtag in the title - #Alonetogether ("Alone together").
"You arrest whites"
LaBeouf's problems with alcohol, meanwhile, have not gone away. Returning from Finland, the actor again found himself in the center of a scandal: in the summer of 2017, he was detained in Savannah, Georgia, for hooliganism and being drunk in a public place. This time, Shaya's actions were captured on a policeman's body camera. A drunken LaBeouf demanded to remove his handcuffs and taught the black cop how to live.
“Your president doesn't care about you, the police department doesn't care about you, and you arrest white people who care because they ask you for a cigarette?” The actor said.
A few days after the tape was leaked to reporters, he publicly apologized, stating that his “undisguised disrespect for representatives law enforcement at least problematic, and at worst, absolutely destructive. "
“I am very ashamed of my behavior, and I do not justify myself in any way. I don’t know if I make such statements too often or too rarely, ”he said. Shia LaBeouf.
The actor was found guilty of insulting a police officer and sent to a rehabilitation center. There, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was exposed to exposure therapy. LaBeouf wrote the script for the 2019 film Sweet Boy based on the recordings from the psychological sessions. In it, the actor described his childhood and relationship with an abusive father. Parallel to this, the picture showed the present of the actor who fell into the rehab, whose prototype was LaBeouf. Shia himself played in the tape of his abuser father. The picture received a lot of praise, was nicknamed the film-redemption, the film-treatment, but in the context of LaBeouf's life, "Sweet Boy" looks more like a film-justification of his behavior.
British singer Thalia Debrett Barnett, better known as FKA twigs (hereinafter referred to as Twigs), played an episodic role in this tape. Then, on the set, she met LaBeouf, and later began an affair with him - that lasted from 2018 to 2019.
"He accused me of looking at the ceiling"
Twigs accused LaBeouf of violence and sued him in December 2020. According to the performer, during her relationship with the actor, she was repeatedly subjected to physical, emotional and psychological abuse. Twigs stated that the wake-up calls appeared at the beginning of their relationship, when LaBeouf showed her "excessive signs of attention."
She also accused the actor of isolating her from relatives and friends by persuading him to move to Los Angeles with him. Shia, she said, kept a loaded pistol near the bed and made scandals for the singer at night, deliberately depriving her of sleep. On one of these nights, he allegedly even tried to strangle her. In addition, he deliberately infected the singer with a sexually transmitted disease, often grabbed her and squeezed, which caused bruises on her body. In the lawsuit, Twigs also pointed out that once her lover unbuckled his seat belt while driving and threatened to break it if she did not immediately confess his love to him.
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In the same lawsuit, evidence was given of another alleged victim of the artist, stylist Carolyn Fo. She dated Shaya from 2010 to 2011. Fo stated that she was subjected to the same violence that the singer talks about.
Later, Twigs revealed the details of the toxic relationship: LaBeouf was jealous of her for the slightest reason, which is why the artist was simply afraid to make eye contact with other men. Shia supposedly expected a certain number of kisses from her per day, could wake the singer up at night and blame her for crazy things.
“He accused me of staring at the ceiling because I’m coming up with a way to throw it. He accused me of wanting to be with someone else. It always happened somewhere between four and seven in the morning ", - said FKA twigs.
After Twigs spoke out publicly against LaBeouf, Australian singer Sia Ferler joined her. She called Shia a pathological liar, claiming that he tricked her into taking part in treason. The actor, judging by the testimony of Sia, managed to have an affair with both her and Twigs, while still married to Mie Goth. At the same time, both singers thought that they were the only objects of Shaya's love. Through communication with Twigs, Sia found out that LaBeouf even communicated with his mistresses with the same phrases.
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Against the backdrop of a lawsuit and another scandal with LaBeouf, the Hollywood talent agency CAA terminated (by mutual agreement) the contract, and Netflix removed the actor's name from the list of artists nominated for the Oscar (LaBeouf starred in the film of the streaming service "Fragments of a Woman"). The CAA noted that Shia is currently back in rehab. The actor himself at the beginning of the scandal in a letter The New York Times Twigs partly confirmed the accusations, emphasizing that because of alcoholism he subjected himself and others to violence.
“I am ashamed of this story and I feel sorry for those whom I offended. What else can I say? " Shia LaBeouf.
At the same time, in another letter, the artist announced that many of the accusations against him were false. Later, LaBeouf's lawyers said that he denies all accusations of Twigs, refuses to plead guilty to both emotional and physical abuse, and is not going to pay the singer any reparations.
All destructive antics, drunken detentions and public scandals by Shia LaBeouf follow the same scenario: the actor makes a fuss, after which, based on the seriousness of the incident, he either laughs it off on a popular evening show (fortunately, he has experience as a comedian), or publicly apologizes, after which another interview with the artist is published in a large glossy publication, in which he is engaged in self-flagellation and mental striptease, talks about an abusive childhood and how alcohol and drugs ruined his life.
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After that, LaBeouf gets a role in some mega-blockbuster or starred in a low-budget auteur film and again wins the sympathy of the public - for all his misdeeds, he really remains a good actor, capable of appearing in completely different roles, as he dreamed more than a decade ago. Given how many times this cycle has been repeated, the method seems to work, and it is unlikely that this scandal (which, apparently, will develop into a lengthy trial) can harm LaBeouf's career more than LaBeouf himself will sooner or later do again. ... Agency CAA, which broke the contract with the actor, did the same with the shock rocker Marilyn Manson - however, after numerous accusations of violence and psychological abuse, 40 percent rose digital music sales.
LaBeouf, who in his youth wanted to be "early Downey Jr.", is actually much more like another celebrity - the cartoon character of BoJack the horse from the Netflix animated series of the same name. In one of the episodes, his friend, refusing to listen to the excuses of the character who has done things again, gives a monologue in which he points to BoJack's self-deception, trying to get an indulgence from what he has done by distracting attention to the circumstances: “You cannot continue to do shitty things and feel sorry for yourself, as if fixes everything. You need to get better. You are all that is wrong with you. Not alcohol or drugs, not what happened to you at work or as a child. It's you".
