At 20, Shia LaBeouf (it's pronounced Shy-ah LaBuff) is already an accomplished actor with a lengthy résumé. After several years of childhood roles in small films and one-shot TV appearances on shows such as The X-Files and Touched By An Angel, LaBeouf garnered some attention—and an "outstanding performance" Emmy—via a three-season stint as the co-lead of the Disney family sitcom Even Stevens. That led to a starring role in Disney's terrific 2003 film Holes, where LaBeouf first worked with future mentor Jon Voight. Since then, LaBeouf has done steady, standout work alternating sidekicky roles in special-effects-driven, big-budget movies—Constantine; I, Robot; Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle—with prominent or starring roles in smaller, more personal films, like A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, the Project Greenlight-produced film The Battle Of Shaker Heights, and Bobby. The pattern continues in 2007—LaBeouf can currently be seen starring in Disturbia, a claustrophobic, teen-centric modernization of Rear Window, and this summer, he'll appear again as the human star of Michael Bay's $150 million monster Transformers. Now touring in support of Disturbia, LaBeouf recently sat down with The A.V. Club to discuss his career, his book-learning, Michael Bay's hard-ass ways, and the Shia LaBeouf character he created for interviews like this one.
The A.V. Club: All your biographies-in-brief make the start of your career sound incredibly simple: pretend to be an adult, call an agent, do a stand-up routine, get a job, become a star. Presumably it didn't seem that easy at the time.
Shia LaBeouf: No, no, no. Everybody's got their route and their challenges, but I've never focused on any of the negative shit, so it's not like I needed to elaborate on what happened. When people ask me about my story, I just go through the positive stuff: the tent-pole moments, the big landmark checkpoints. As far as that goes, me getting an agent was an insane story, it was an insane situation. Even Stevens, that was an insane situation. When you live this insane thing, I guess it's not insane anymore. So I guess at this point, looking back, it does seem like this soundbite, writer-friendly fucking bio. It wasn't like that when I was living through it, because I didn't know what the outcome would be. The result was never intact when I was going through this stuff. If I had known that I was going to get an agent when I was on that phone, it would have been a different phone call. But I didn't, and that probably why I got an agent.
It's not been easy, but considering a story like Dustin Hoffman's, where he got his first role when he was 30, I'm fortunate. But there's more roles now, more films now, more opportunity now. Especially for young actors. I was talking to John Turturro, who's a really good friend from Transformers. He said when he was my age, he had to go to school. He's like, "Why would you want to go to school? It made sense for me to go to school, 'cause when I was your age, there was no work. But it makes no sense for you to go to school, because everything you'd study, you're working on." I still want to go to school regardless, but these days, it's a different marketplace from what it was in the '70s and '80s. Really, the children-boom thing has just recently happened.
AVC: You were accepted to Yale in 2003. Is going there still part of your plan for the future?
SL: When I get a chance, I'm going to go, but even Yale says, "You got opportunities right now, college doesn't make too much sense."
AVC: What do you want to major in?
SL: Psychology.
AVC: What do you want to do with it?
SL: Be a better actor. There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion—I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun.
AVC: Do you have any formal acting training?
SL: I knew nothing about craft at all until I met Jon Voight, who gave me, like, 25 books and a bunch of movies and DVDs and tapes. I've gone back and read through Sanford Meisner, and the Michael Caine book on acting [Acting In Film], and Stanislavsky, and Lee Strasberg, and Larry Moss, all these different versions of craft. [Voight] wasn't a fan of acting teachers, so it was like, literature was the easier way to stomach it. 'Cause if you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it. That was all Voight. He introduced me to movies that I never would have watched. I was 14 when I met him, so Elephant Man wasn't in my lexicon of film. Papillon and Kramer Vs. Kramer—Dustin Hoffman's career became the shit to me, you know? I'm going back and watching how magical Jon Voight is in Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home. It became like, "These are my superheroes." I didn't have that before him.
AVC: Were you aware as you started taking on more adult roles how rare and difficult it normally is for child actors to become respected adult actors?
SL: Yeah, because they fall into traps. They become types. The cutesy type, the funny type, the dark type. Any time you're a type, your career's over. It's not been effortless for me; I've had bumps in the road, you know? I was in Dumb And Dumberer. It's not been a flawless thing so far. But all in all, I'm proud of it. Most proud of it because of the diversity. Because the genres are different. My last year was Bobby, and Guide To Recognizing Your Saints. Now this year, it's Disturbia, Surf's Up, and Transformers.
AVC: That's a pretty wide range.
SL: Yeah, so the range is what I'm… and then execution of the range is important always. The choices have been interesting, and I think the fact that I'm not a star, I'm not a celebrity, I've kind of been under the radar, has kept it easier for me to maintain a career.
AVC: Are you at the point where you're picking your roles? Are you actively looking for diversity?
SL: Oh yeah, there's a little bit of both. Again, I, Robot wasn't something I was going to… Will Smith called me. That led into my role in Constantine, because it was produced by Akiva Goldsman, I, Robot's writer. Those weren't movies I auditioned for. So it's a little bit of both. It's all over the place. For Guide, Dito [Montiel, Guide's writer-director] didn't want me for the movie. He thought I was this Disney kid, and he wouldn't let me audition. So when I got an audition, I fucked his office up, I put a hole through the wall, I went as crazy as I could. Violently angry, so that I wasn't that image he had of me. Some things, you have to earn, because you have a stigma attached. After I did Bobby, people started offering me drug-addict roles. It's always whatever your last film was. After Disturbia comes out, it'll be a bunch of thrillers. It's the ebb and flow of a film career. Some things, you have to go in and earn. Sometimes you don't get it. There's like five or six of us that go for the same roles all of the time. It's very competitive.
AVC: What's the role you most wanted that you didn't get?
SL: There's a couple of them. There was this movie called House Of D. [Writer-director] David Duchovny, we sat down, we went through it, we rehearsed. I was doing the movie. But I was stuck on I, Robot, and couldn't get off the set. And they gave it to somebody else. Robin Williams [who co-starred in House Of D] was always my dude, he's king, he's fucking Batman to me. So that hurt me bad, especially at that time, 'cause I was stuck in Vancouver, shooting two scenes in a eight-month shoot on the beginning of this movie. So there were months and months when I wasn't doing anything. And all I wanted to do was be with Robin Williams. So that was painful. That was the worst of all of them. This Jesse James movie with Brad Pitt [The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford], I wanted that really bad, and it came down to me and Casey Affleck, but he's older and works better with that whole situation. I was too young to play the role to begin with. But you go to the first audition, and you know you're not going to get it, you're too young. Second audition, you're still too young, third audition, you're like, "Huh, wait a second here…" Fourth audition, fifth audition, you start going, "Okay, I want this shit now." Sixth audition, you don't get it, and it's tough. There's always things like that.
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