By
Edward Davis
|
The Playlist
Tue Oct 14 13:00:07 EDT 2014
So Shia LaBeouf had a bad year, but he’s seemingly coming out the other end and is doing the mea culpa rounds on talk show TV. You’ll recall LaBeouf disrupted the “Nymphomaniac” press conference earlier this year, then wore a bag on his head that said, “I’m not famous,” was charged with plagiarism by several websites, and then in June was arrested for unruly behavior during a performance of Broadway’s “Cabaret,” starring Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams. He also fought a homeless man earlier that day.
“I had been drinking a lot of whiskey in Ireland, I come back, I land, and it’s the World Cup,” LaBeouf said on “Jimmy Kimmel” last night about his arrest. “And you drink a lot of whiskey during the World Cup, it seems.” LaBeouf even admitted to patting Cummings butt while he was on stage “because I think he deserves it. He’s seducing me, he’s the sexiest man I’ve ever seen.” Umm, ok.
But it seems LaBeouf’s problems may have stemmed from his days shooting the WWII drama “Fury” which opens in theaters this weekend. Brad Pitt’s already called LaBeouf one of the greatest actors he’s ever worked with, but it’s clear that LaBeouf went a little too far with his method-y approach.
What is fascinating about his meltdown is that LaBeouf’s character in “Fury”—a movie about a band of brothers trapped in a tank on a dangerous mission over enemy lines near the end of WWII— is perhaps the most sedate of them all. Pitt’s character is the tough father figure, Wardaddy, Jon Bernthal’s character is akin to Animal in “The Muppets,” and LaBeouf is a tank gunner who’s more of a tranquil, Bible-quoting figure that director David Ayer has described as “the mother” of the tank.
But you’d think LaBeouf was preparing to play Bernthal’s impetuous and out-of-control character for all his crazy antics. The actor’s bizarre behavior had been rumored for months: apparently he kept his personal hygiene to a bare minimum, got a tooth pulled for the film and actually cut a scar onto his face. "[LaBeouf] walks out into the hallway and says, 'hey man, wanna see something fun? Check this out...' and he takes out a knife and cuts his face,” Logan Lerman recently told British GQ. “For the whole movie, he kept opening these cuts on his face. That's all real."
LaBeouf copped to all his rumored bad behavior. “No, I got it removed for the movie,” LaBeouf told Kimmel last night of his missing tooth in the movie. The actor evidently had problems getting it down in the more proper parts of Los Angeles because every dentist told him it didn’t “make medical sense. So I got it done by some guy in Reseda next to a Radio Shack and he didn’t ask too many questions.”
And apparently there were lots of fights. “The director had you fist fighting on set every day, right?” Kimmel asked.
“Oh, yeah, everyday,” LaBeouf said. “It worked. It really bonded us. You can only get so much out in a conversation [so] with a bunch of boys in that setting, fighting is really intimate. I’m not saying we [didn’t] get mad at each other, but we love each other and it dies when we leave.”
LaBeouf told Ellen DeGeneres earlier in the week that he went through an "existential crisis." More crazy stories from this shoot are likely going to come out this week. “Fury” opens in wide release on October 17th. Check out the Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen interviews below.
