interview - SHIA LaBEOUF
Shia LaBeouf’s About to Explode
And not just because he’s in a Michael Bay movie. The 21-year-old has gone from sweet character actor to blockbuster star in a matter of months, first with the surprise hit Disturbia and now with Bay’s long-anticipated Transformers. But he swears it won’t change him. Honestly.
By Bob Strauss
Megatron and Optimus Prime think they’re big deals? Maybe on the old Transformers cartoon show. But in Michael Bay’s new live and CGI Transformers movie, the vehicular alien entities just might have to take a backseat to hot young star Shia LaBeouf.
In a case of all the showbiz stars aligning for some lucky kid, journeyman juvenile actor LaBeouf (he was TV’s Even Stevens and appeared in such movies as Holes, I, Robot and The Greatest Game Ever Played) just can’t seem to pick a bad project these days.
His thriller Disturbia was one of the spring’s surprise hits. The animated Surf’s Up, in which LaBeouf provides the voice for plucky waverider Cody Maverick, performs the nearly impossible feat of making penguins not only cute, but actually cool. And now there’s the highly anticipated Transformers, in which warring robot species from outer space bring their battle to Earth. LaBeouf’s teen hero, Sam Witwicky, finds himself in the thick of things when his ’77 Camaro turns out to be something much more than a classic ride.
Speaking of classics, LaBeouf is currently working on the even longer-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie. All this, and he just turned 21. Pretty good for a guy with a funny name. Now everybody knows how to pronounce it.
LaBeouf was in Los Angeles when we spoke about his 21st birthday, growing up the son of a mime, and why Transformers, a movie about robot aliens, is a lot realer than you think.
Now that you’re legal, are you planning a wild, boozy blowout celebration of your good fortune?
“I don’t find that of paramount importance. Some people are curious and that’s why they get involved in drinking and drugs. I just don’t have that curiosity. Because of my upbringing and what I’m in, this is far too important to me to f--k it up. So drinking becomes secondary — something I can’t do, period, even when I’m 21. Somebody offered me $30,000 to go have my party in Vegas at some club. I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ It’s also a really lame choice. That’s a really Hollywood move. I’m not doing that.”
But have you been able to process this year’s success in some way?
“I haven’t even sat back to reflect on it. I’m still in the middle of it. It’s not like there’s been a period when I’m not working that I could sit back and go, ‘Wow.’ It’s just been from one thing to the next and the next.”
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Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf in Transformers
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Now you’re in Transformers. Some people think it’s a dumb idea for a movie, others are deliriously excited about it. Were you a fan of the toys or the TV show?
“Huge. Star Wars was too early for me. My Star Wars was Transformers. They were the male Barbie. That was the only science fiction I ever really bought into, that and Isaac Asimov. And now that we’ve got the movie coming out, the storyline’s getting even more advanced and deeper.”
Think it’ll stand out from all of this summer’s supersequels?
“The difference is that, as opposed to some of these superhero movies, you’re not going to have a dude show up with a cape and save you. It’s not gonna happen, it’s not tangible. It is real that we are using robots in military action right now. Robots go in and defuse bombs, planes completely fly themselves; this is real stuff, this is not completely a fantasy world. The technology that goes into these things is all from JPL and NASA, it’s all factual stuff. It’s not like we’re using a plasma gun that doesn’t exist. The plasma gun we use does exist.”
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Cool. But you’re not actually calling Michael Bay a realist, are you?
“We shot a lot of stuff in real locations that we could have done on green screen. We didn’t have to shoot in downtown Los Angeles, shut the streets off and blow the Orpheum Theater. But because Bay cares about your performance, he doesn’t want to leave that up to chance. He wants to light your hair on fire and blow the building up. You’re gonna respond the way you’re gonna respond and it’s very natural because it’s really happening.”
Uh, cool again, I guess. But I was kind of expecting a couple special effects, maybe, Transformers being about mechanical space invaders and all.
“Industrial Light and Magic — they do all the computer graphics for Star Wars and Superman and Pirates of the Caribbean, they do all of ’em — have said that they’ve never worked on anything at this level, and that this is the best graphics they’ve ever created. You know, you couldn’t make Transformers a year ago; the technology’s just at a different place now. I mean, Optimus Prime’s hand alone has 15,000 moving pieces. It’s just mind-blowing.”
Were you this thrilled to get tapped by Steven Spielberg for the fourth Indy movie, or is that some old-fart thing to you?
“This is the most anticipated movie, ever, in my lifetime, ever in my generation’s lifetime. It’s the most anticipated movie in the last 30 years of filmmaking. Of course, I’d do it in a second. Anybody would.”
Are you and Harrison Ford racing to see who can bulk up faster?
“We’re not in a race. He’s a beast right now, he’s really cut up. Steven said, midway through the working-out thing, ‘I don’t want you to get big. Just be ready for what we’re about to do.’ So I’ve never been in better shape in my life, never been more athletic. I train every day.”
The cliché is that child actors have a rough time transitioning into adulthood. You seem to be defying that stereotype; has doing this since you were a kid helped you cope with growing stardom?
“It’s the people who don’t have a foundation who make this the foundation. And this is a shaky foundation. It’s here and then it’s gone and it’s here and then it’s gone. If I became a train conductor tomorrow I would still have the same family and friends around me.”
Your dad’s a mime, your mother was a ballerina and one of your grandfathers was a comedian. But you got into show business for purely financial reasons, right?
“I was living in Echo Park, which was a pretty bad neighbourhood [in L.A.]. I wasn’t a thug or anything, but my parents didn’t really have jobs, per se. So that’s why. They would do open mic nights at comedy clubs and, at 10, I would get up and do jokes about masturbation and my parents having sex.”
And your folks were okay with that?
“Yeah. I could’ve had other hobbies, y’know. They’re definitely into it now.”
And as you get more successful, it’s natural that more people will be getting into you. How’s your love life been affected by all of this?
“I’ve only been in love with one girl in my life. She’s from L.A., a wonderful girl, goes to college. We’re on pause now because all of this is insane. There’s no room for a relationship. But I was with her for three years before this last little pause. She’s great.”
Think you’ll get back together?
“We’ll see. Life is fun, I’m 21 years old. I mean, you get back together after three years, and the natural progression is you get married. I’m not getting married for a while. I don’t know anything about myself yet to be able to get involved in something like that.”
What about religion? You have both Jewish and Cajun, presumably Catholic, heritage.
“I had a bar mitzvah and was baptized; I did it for both sides. It just shows you how funny both sides are. Religion is funny. If it gives people hope, it makes sense. But it never made sense to me.”
You’re quite a philosophical fellow. Got one to apply to your career yet — like, perhaps, trying not to sell out?
“There’s just no point in it. I could probably make a lot of money doing it, have a huge, amazing house in the hills somewhere, drive a Lamborghini and never be able to sleep in my really rich, comfy bed because I would hate myself. I have a pride thing that won’t let me do that. I’d rather not work.”
Bob Strauss is an entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He also wrote this issue’s interview with Emma Watson.
Love machine
Fans of the film Boogie Nights will remember the hilarious scene in which porn star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) goes into a recording studio to cut a record. Unfortunately, the well-endowed “actor” wasn’t born with a big voice, and he stinks up the studio with a wretched version of the already agonizing ’80s power pop tune “The Touch.”
Of course Transformers fans — a.k.a. Transfans — will be the first to tell you that “The Touch” was originally performed by Stan Bush and appeared on the soundtrack for the 1986 animated Transformers film, The Transformers: The Movie.
Stan Bush has been kicking around the rock scene for more than 25 years and hit his creative peak providing the music for cheesy ’80s action movies such as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer. And while we won’t hear “The Touch” in Michael Bay’s new Transformers movie — much to the displeasure of Transfans everywhere — there is a chance the aging rocker will be heard in the movie, as he let it be known on his MySpace page that he’s submitted a balls-to-the-walls tune to the film’s producers hoping it’ll be included on the soundtrack. —IR