Today in "what Shia LaBeouf is doing instead of Transformers": playing a 20-foot man-child, getting beaten up in Vancouver

The past 24 hours have been so filled with reports on what Shia LaBeouf isn’t doing—namely, revealing new layers to his manic boy of destiny character in the Transformers franchise—that naturally there must be a counterbalance. So here’s what LaBeouf is doing, as opposed to being Hollywood’s last bad boy, with the leather jackets and the smoking cigarettes and stuff: According to Variety, he’s signed on to star as “a 20-foot-tall man-child” who has a love affair with the girl next door in the tentatively titled A Giant, from Monster House director Gil Kenan and The Jim Henson Company.

The script, written by Kenan himself, concerns a woman who escapes a series of bad relationships by moving back home with her brother, only to discover that there’s a giant guy next door who looks like Shia LaBeouf, and that he also has a giant heart and so on, plus [PG-13 allusion to his genitals and/or bowel movements]. LaBeouf, of course, recently declared that his maxim for choosing all future movie roles is “What Would Warren Beatty Do?” and apparently decided that, in this case, Warren Beatty would be the CGI-enhanced thing that other actors are gazing up at for a change.

Also, in “what Shia LaBeouf is doing”: Getting punched repeatedly by, in TMZ’s words, “a shirtless, hairy-bellied man” outside a bar in Vancouver. As you can see from the video below, LaBeouf reacted to the pummeling with the sort of bubbling, pugilistic rage that is mentioned a lot of his magazine profiles, only to be held back by a friend urging him to “lay low,” and eventually find comfort in a random Vancouverite proffering hugs—which may or may not be a trap. After all, between this and what happened to DJ Qualls, Vancouver is basically becoming the Gaza Strip in the growing Canadian war on American actors.