Given our hunger for celebrity schadenfreude, for which LaBeouf is manna, it’s easy to look past his electric talent and focus instead on his small mountain of baggage. Footage of his booze-fueled, racially charged breakdown was leaked to the shame-generating machine that is TMZ, and he was sent to court-ordered rehab for ten weeks, starting last fall. bartender for a shouting match in a bowling alley and arrested in Savannah for public intoxication. In the last year alone, he was stalked by Internet trolls sued for $5 million by an L.A. With LaBeouf, thirty-one, there’s not just one “it” there is a truckload that has turned him into a walking meme. The truth is, in my desperation, I lost the plot.” He pauses, then, as if to head off any potential awkwardness, says, “I know this is uncomfortable for you to bring up, bro. I’ve been falling forward for a long time. “I need to take ownership of my shit and clean up my side of the street a bit before I can go out there and work again, so I’m trying to stay creative and learn from my mistakes. “I’ve got to look at my failures in the face for a while,” he says. They’re a struggling motherfucker showing his ass in front of the world.” And since LaBeouf, more than anyone else, did the ripping, he knows it’s now on him to do the mending. “McEnroe was a master at his rage,” he says. Unlike McEnroe’s outbursts, which became crowd-pleasing shtick, LaBeouf’s have left his offscreen reputation tattered. He plays John McEnroe, the tennis savant whose reputation as a powder keg often overshadowed his prodigious talent, with entropic physicality-fiery eyes, a fast smile, loose limbs ball-socketed to his trunk-but also with restraint: a born fighter who’s striving for self-control. It’s an elitist sport.” As his voice tap-dances up and down the lower register, he speaks honestly and without hesitation. I only hate it more since having done this film. McEnroe (April 13), though, as he says, “I’m a terrible used-car salesman.” To wit: “I have no interest in tennis. LaBeouf is here to discuss his new movie, Borg vs. His outfit is Valley Dad: well-fitted if unassuming khakis and a sweatshirt. As I approach him, he stands to greet me. He is alone at a four-top, his eyes trained forward, unmoving. When I arrive, I see LaBeouf through the window. He usually comes here with his wife, the actress and model Mia Goth, or his mother, Shayna, with whom he speaks daily. He picked this spot because, as I learn, it’s a safe space, turf where he feels secure. We are about ten miles southwest of Tujunga, where he lived from ages five to thirteen, when he became a full-time actor. LaBeouf invites me to dinner at a family-friendly joint in Sherman Oaks, the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood where he’s lived for nearly a decade.
It takes a very strong human being to sustain a genuine sense of well-being through that baptism of fire.” Then: “Drama is not known to attract stable types.” And then, within a split second, they’re asked to be a psychopath. “To be disciplined and accountable, communicative and a pleasure to work with.
“A performer is asked to do two things,” he tells me. Tom Hardy, who worked with LaBeouf on 2012’s Lawless, points to the paradox central to their work. But too often we forget that everyone screws up on their path toward becoming an adult and that few do so under the gaze of the public eye and that by embracing the kind of capital-A Acting LaBeouf aims to do, we nourish the same spark from which his bad behavior stems. Yes, LaBeouf is the guy who was handed a golden ticket and promptly lit it on fire. It’s been a long time since Vanity Fair put him on the cover of its August 2007 issue, wearing a spacesuit over a suit-suit (it looks as awkward as it sounds), and heralded him at age twenty-one as “the Next Tom Hanks.” More than a decade on, LaBeouf’s arc is less a stratospheric ascent than a misguided rocket wobbling across the sky, strewing wreckage. For the past two months, he’s conducted practice interviews over the phone with his therapist, anticipating all of the possible scenarios, workshopping his responses to my questions. Shia LaBeouf is nervous about this story-“I have so much fear about this thing,” he confesses to me when we first meet-and it drives him to do what he’s always done when faced with something he cannot fully control: Prepare.