Playboy Interview: Shia LaBeouf

A candid conversation with the outspoken actor about his clashes with the law, sex on the set, his hippie childhood and how he became an unlikely action star

Radical honesty is not a trait most young Hol­lywood actors possess. Between studio expecta­tions, the muzzle of publicists and ego-driven proclivities to appear happy and in control, the likelihood of a completely candid answer to, say, "How are you?" or "Is there truth to the rumor of..." is basically nil.

Not so with Shia LaBeouf an actor seem­ingly unafraid to present himself as human, even with a gargantuan summer blockbuster like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to promote. Partly, it's that LaBeouf who is only 22, manages to remain likeable no matter wliat he says or does off camera. This is the guy who once told a TV entertainment reporter that Lindsay Lohan had made "some scary deci­sions, " adding, "If I'm perceived as someone like that, I'm going to be screwed."

In 2007, with three of his mox'ies—Surf's Up, Disturbia and the original Transform­ers—on their way to grossing more than $1 billion worldwide, LaBeouf was arrested at a Chicago Walgreens on criminal trespass­ing charges for refusing to leave the store at a security guard's request. Appearing on The Late Show With David Letterman to explain himself, LaBeouf admitted that he was "pretty messed up on the special magic sauce" and that he acted like a "moron." Four months later, on the eve of the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which

LaBeouf plays Harrison Ford's son and cohort in adventure, the actor failed to show for a court appearance after being cited for unlaw­ful smoking. That led to a warrant for his arrest. His latest outing run amok occurred midway through shooting Transformers 2 last summer, when the pickup LaBeouf was driv­ing reportedly ran a red light, flipped over and hit another car. Though supporters rushed to defend the actor ("He was not drunk," insisted Transformers director Michael Bay at the time), LaBeouf, who seriously injured his left hatui, has spent much of the past year copping to his addiction problems while still eyeing new monster projects. His latest big move: a star­ring role in John Grisham's legal thriller The Associate, currently in production.

Wiry and baby faced with a tough-talking delivery that suggests deeply urban wots, Shia LaBeouf (pronounced "sin-a Io-buff") was born in LA.'s gritty Echo Park neighborhood on June 11, 1986. He comes from a long line of misfits, showboats ami troublemakers. One great-grandmother played piano in Lucky Luciano's casino. His maternal grandfather—also named Shia—was a Catskills comic who sidelined as a barber for the Mafia. His dad's paretus were a Cajun Green Beret and a Jewish beatnik lesbian who cavorted with Allen Ginsberg. LaBeouf's own childhood was just as bohemian. Mom sold hippie jewelry out of their apartment. Dad was

a street clown (and frustrated actor) who once opened for the Doobie Brothers.

At the age of nine LaBeouf launched his career with raunchy stand-up routines at adult comedy clubs around L.A. That helped him land an agent, who got him an Oreo com­mercial and soon enough a role on the Disney TV series Even Stevens. His first movie, Holes (2003), made close to $70 million. Cast that year at Steven Spielberg's request in the origi­nal Transformers movie, LaBeouf found him­self on the cover of Vanity Fair, which dubbed him the next Tom Hanks, a moniker he has tried to I we up to (or Iwe down) ever since.

Contributing Editor David Hochman has spent time with LaBeouf oxvr the years—inevi­tably trailed by paparazzi—and says, "Of all the celebrities I've interviewed in more than a decade, nobody's more open than Shia. There's no small talk. The conversation went deep as soon as I asked him about the injury from his accident."

PLAYBOY: How's your hand? LABEOUF: Permanently fucked. I'll never be back to 100 percent or have full recov­ery. I can't zipper my zipper or button my shirt without extreme pain. But I chalk it up as my own shit. These things had to happen. This accident is what I needed in my life. I'm not in control. For the first time, 1 can admit that and know that. I'm

a fallible individual, and the hand is like a tattoo that says mistake. It's something I'll have to live with for the rest of my life. PLAYBOY: You sound like a changed man. LABEOUF: My attitude is different. It was a wake-up call. This shit's not fun. Being a public asshole is not fun. Being a gimp for months and months is not fun. Losing your driver's license—it sucks. And I'm some­body who doesn't just roll with these things. These past few months I've experienced a lot of self-hatred, a lot of blatant insanity, a lot of thinking about all kinds of shit. PLAYBOY: How much were you drinking that night?

LABEOUF: I had a whiskey and three beers. It's a good amount of alcohol. It's enough to be impaired, for sure. I'm not going to start speaking on law stuff now and corner myself, but the fact that I ever got into the car was a mistake. What I remember of the accident is my finger lying in the street, a fireman putting me into an ambulance and my going into surgery. That's it. PLAYBOY: Your finger was lying in the street? LABEOUF: A piece of it, yeah. My hand got jammed under the car, and a slice of the finger came off. So I just picked it up and showed it to the fireman. A chunk of my hand. It was really insane-looking. So when people ask why I refused to take the Breath­alyzer, it's that I wasn't exactly in a convers­ing kind of mode. No time to sit there and play detective, guys. The firemen were like, "Get this dude to a hospital." PLAYBOY: Have you quit drinking? LABEOUF: To say I haven't had a drink is not true. I've had drinks, but it has been a leveling-out process. It's coming to terms with my urges and limitations. I have an addictive tinge, and it's in my family. My father's father drank himself to death. He was a Green Beret, a respected military man, but when he came home he had no interest in life and just drank. My family has been in AA for a while. A lot of close friends around me are in AA, and I'm in AA now too. It's helping me. It may not work tomorrow, but if I get the urge to drink, I call a friend or go to a meeting. Am I an alcoholic? I may not be. I don't know. But I also know that in the situation I'm in, with temptations what they are, I have no room for alcohol in my life. I'm also 22. If I were in college, this kind of behavior would be tolerated. There would be other 22-year-olds trying to figure out shit the way I am. But because I'm in the public eye, I have to shut down the chaos completely or I'll be fucked. I should be clear, though. Drinking is not my prob­lem. Being uncomfortable is my problem. Insecurities are my problem. Fear is my problem. Those are my problems. PLAYBOY: So many young actors, espe­cially former child stars, screw up. With all the money, all the people invested in your success, all the resources available, why does it still happen? LABEOUF: It's not like there's a ramp-up period. There's no simmering point, when people can just intervene and say, "No!

Wait! Don't do that." Shit happens, and it happens quickly. In my case Indiana Jones had just been released to the biggest box-office numbers Steven Spielberg had ever experienced. You just get the call from Steven, saying, "Hey, it's the biggest thing financially I've ever been involved in." And the next day, literally the next day, you're on your hands and knees looking for a piece of your hand. When was some­body supposed to jump in and stop me? PLAYBOY: Spielberg has done so much to help your career. Do you worry you've disappointed him?

LABEOUF: Oh God, yeah. Shit, yeah. He took me under his cape and said, "Okay, let's fly." The 10 years I worked in the industry before I met him don't really count. To me it was a 10-year wait to meet him, and then my career began. And what did I do to the respect he gave me? I spit on it. What I can say about Steven, though, is that he's not a judgmental dude. He remains faithful and very much a mentor. He calls to check in. Partly, he's checking on his investment, I realize, but he's also checking in as a friend, as a concerned adult. Harrison Ford calls too. Talking to him is always helpful because it's almost like talking to John Wayne. "Muscle up and get through it," he'll say, and coming from him it's not just some cowboy-lingo shit. It's like medicine for me. Probably the best advice I got this year was from Har­vey Weinstein. I don't even know the guy, but he came up to me at an event recently. To me he's one of the figureheads, one of the Marvel comic-book characters of Hol­lywood, and he said, "Don't forget to be young, man." I took that to mean you can beat yourself up all you want, but it's okay. You make mistakes. Move on. PLAYBOY: You managed to get Transform­ers 2 done. How is the sequel different from the original?

LABEOUF: It's bigger. Fuck, is this movie big! We were the first movie to film at Wadi Rum in Jordan since Lawrence of Arabia. The first movie ever to shoot with actors on the Pyramids. And we got something like five Guinness records for making this film, including one for the biggest explosion with an actor in it in the history of cinema. PLAYBOY: Let us guess. You were the actor? LABEOUF: Yeah. Amazing for a little Jew from Lcho Park, isn't it? It's outrageous. Leave it to Michael Bay to blow shit up with 500 gallons of gasoline. The big explosion was so loud, I felt my organs shake. The heat totally bakes you. Trees were splintering and then started explod­ing. There's another scene where I have to run down a hill through a forest with a camera cruising behind me at 30 miles an hour. I'm supposed to hit a mark so the camera can whiz over my head. But if I somehow miss the fucking mark, this big monster camera that weighs as much as a car slams me in the head and I'm fucking toast. But I survived. PLAYBOY: What's the secret to acting oppo­site a Transformer? Aren't those robots all added later via computer-generated imagery?

LABEOUF: Yeah. Mostly it's just my trying to look fucking terrified. It's a ridiculous situation. You have to believe there's really a robot the size of a building about to chomp your ass. But Michael makes it easy. He'll blow things up for no reason, just to get a reaction. The guy's a maniac. But I'm not going to lie to you; the act­ing I do in these movies isn't The Elephant Man or anything. I'm just a flag holder, a sign carrier. Transformers, Dislurbiti, EagU Eye—these are massive fucking movies, and my job is somehow to be the anchor in the chaos. It's not my place to work some kind of Turkish accent or worry if

I'm conveying some bullshit actory vibe with a twitch of my left eyebrow. PLAYBOY: Does that get frustrating? LABEOUF: Sure, I'd sometimes rather be cooking pancakes with Dustin Hoffman in a movie like Kramer vs. Kramer. Or playing Jake LaMotta. Itjust hasn't worked out that way. I'm not going to complain. My career has been unbelievably fucking amazing. But I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. People think there's some grand-strategy-plan shit. I just get called on to do these movies, so I do diem. I'm a hired fucking gun, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to get the roles I get. PLAYBOY: Do you see yourself as part of an emerging new generation of actors? LABEOUF: I don't see it as that, but there's so much talent out there right now. More than in the generation before, if you ask me. The group breaking now is rag­ing: Emile Hirsch, Jamie Bell, Joseph Cross from Running With Scissors, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. These will be the guys rul­ing Hollywood. Or a guy like Ben Foster from Flash Forward. Pound for pound, he's the best actor under 30. Then there are the women: Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood, Camilla Bell, Kristen Stewart from Twilight. The best of the bunch is Amber Tamblyn, from The Sisterhood of the Travel­ing Pants movies. She may be better than all the dudes. What's funny is my role has become "physical action guy." I was never really the most masculine dude, and here I am at the center of these grand fuck­ing spectacles. I think it's good for me. It cranks up the testosterone. The problem is it can be hard to turn that shit off when the movie's done.

PLAYBOY: And that's when you get into trouble?

LABEOUF: When I'm not working, I go crazy. Decompression is hard on a movie like Transformers. Think about it, man. For months at a time, every day, every night, you're the ringmaster of the biggest circus on earth. You get to play with the biggest toys. You get to smash things together at the highest speeds. I've always been hap­piest on set. It's the one place I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do. When action is called, it's complete freedom. It's like flying. Just like flying. But then suddenly you're in life mode. When you're not working, that's when the shit starts flying. You're out in the world, but you're still feeling invincible. The trouble is there's no stunt man around off the set. There's no pyro team. Shit blows up in your life, and there's nobody there to put it out. I didn't have the most grounded childhood, so it's hard to put boundaries in place as an adult sometimes. You feel your way through. PLAYBOY: Can you describe the apartment in Echo Park where you grew up? What did it look like?

LABEOUF: It was in a dilapidated pink building. We lived on the diird floor with another family. It was a one-bedroom place. One bathroom. I lived in the back room with another kid. My mom and dad lived

in the living room. They had a factory in the kitchen where my mom made jewelry she sold on the streets. My dad was work­ing as a clown at the time, so down makeup and clown outfits were all over the place. There was a chicken living in the apart­ment. Sometimes I'd walk into the bath­room and see my dad doing this Dances With Wolves Zen kind of chicken dance; he'd be trying to get the chicken to get all comfy with him. So we had that. And a Sno-Cone machine. Dad would put on the makeup and sell Sno-Cones and hot dogs around the neighborhood. We were broke as shit. But it wasn't just the lack of money. It was an unusual environment. My parents were strange people with a very strange relation­ship. We definitely weren't driving a station wagon and going to soccer practice. PLAYBOY: What did your mom do that was strange?

LABEOUF: The nudity was weird, espe­cially when her friends came over. All of them would just be naked around the house. That was strange for me, and it was really bizarre when my friends were there. You've got your little buds over, and Mom's, like, playing naked connect the dots or whatever. She's in the middle of goddess-group time, where it's literally a bunch of naked women tracing auras around one another's bodies with incense and then sitting together and humming for prolonged periods of time. PLAYBOY: What was the situation with drugs when you were growing up?

LABEOUF: They were around. I grew up with a bunch of hippies, and marijuana was always around. Pot was never looked at as a negative thing. I could smoke it on holidays with my parents, and we were all good. I like pot. It has never been a monster for me. I can put limits on it. But I definitely saw from a very young age what drugs can do to you. Watching my dad wasn't fun. When I was younger, he would be in the hospital and I couldn't see him because he was coming down off his shit and couldn't cope. PLAYBOY: What was he using? LABEOUF: I was never 100 percent sure but pretty much anything. I remember seeing him do heroin two or three times, though I didn't know it was heroin at the time. He just looked like a doctor. You know, kids play doctor and pretend to give one another injections. I thought, He's just messing around or being creative. He would get high and draw. But it was that kind of environment. Kids came over to my house so they could do all the things they couldn't get away with at home. Play­ing with fireworks. Staying up all night. PLAYBOY: Did you ever wish you had par­ents who were more normal? LABEOUF: Not really. Normal is boring. The shit we were doing felt much more fun and alive than that. Instead of going to Chuck E. Cheese, my mom would take me and my friends to her ashram. So you'd have a bunch of zoned-out hippies and six little six-year-old dudes playing Nerf football.

All the hippies were blissing out, and the kids were jacked up on candy. You're six years old, and you're freaking out on as many M&M's and Gummi Bears as you can ingest. I had the freedom to do what­ever the fiick I wanted, and when you're a kid, that seems cool. It was anything goes. PLAYBOY: What kind of trouble did you get into?

LABEOUF: I was kicked out of every school I went to. I was always a smart-mouthed kid, and I did some ballsy stuff from a young age. I was kicked out of Pinewood Elementary for stealing the tetherball and taking it home. At 32nd Street Middle School I was expelled for cursing. Because I hung around with all these hippies at home, I knew a bunch of curse words none of the other kids did. I remember making fun of one of the teachers. He had this nasty beard, and I told him, "You've got a huge pubic forest on your face." We were eight or nine years old, and no kid in class knew what pubic meant. PLAYBOY: That sort of language helped you break into show business. Can you give us a taste of your routine as a nine-year-old stand-up comic? LABEOUF: I would start off sounding like a timid child. Maybe I'd tell a knock-knock joke. It was an unusual set: When you have a nine-year-old performing at a club, you can't serve alcohol, so all the drinks would be cleared for the five minutes I was up there. People weren't used to seeing a kid in a situation like that, so they'd applaud politely and diink I was cute. But again, I would hook them with bullshit jokes. "What kind of monkey flies? A hot-air baboon." Then suddenly I'd go, "All right, motherfuckers, now I'm really going to tell you jokes." Their faces would just drop. It was like watching a bipolar child up there. Or the Exorcist kid. It was as if somebody else were speaking for me, and I was the vessel. "So I walked in on my mom and dad fucking the other night." And it would just get nastier and nastier. Shit jokes, cunt jokes, really, really dark material. My dad wrote most of it. And it was coming out of this kid with a bowl haircut in corduroy OshKosh B'Gosh. People would laugh, but I think they were more stunned and ner­vous than amused.

PLAYBOY: So you went from telling dirty jokes onstage to starring in Even Stevens, a teen comedy series for Disney. Was it difficult to control your mouth? LABEOUF: It was tough, especially because Even Stevens required a ton of ad-libbing, so die "fucks" would fly after a few takes. Disney was such a wholesome place. It was full of clean-cut young people, all these kids from musical-theater backgrounds who wanted to be straight-up song-and-dance performers. And here I was—the only white kid in his school, living in the ghetto, my parents were hippies—so I'm instantly the doesn't-fit-in-here guy. But you know, you're 10 hours in and everybody's getting tired on set, so you're like. All right, you gotta boost morale. So this other actor, AJ.

Trauth, and I would do insane things. We'd be working on scenes in the school, and we'd decide, "Hey, let's strip down to our bare asses and streak down the hallway." Somewhere in the Disney vaults there's video footage with my penis in it. PLAYBOY: Can you explain why Even Ste­vens, a show for teens, became popular among college kids?

LABEOUF: They were the majority of our audience, actually. 1 think it's because there were inside jokes younger kids weren't get­ting but older ones were. At the time, we figured even the Disney executives weren't getting them. Our coach's name on the show was coach Tugnut. Nobody ever questioned it. Principal Wexler was this extremely feminine, queeny type—very extreme, very touchy with the kids. In one episode, another character is trying to get closer to her dad because they've been apart for so long. But it has this weird incestuous edge. It wasn't supposed to be that strange a show, but it was. PLAYBOY: What was it like going through puberty on the set of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle}

LABEOUF: Holy fucking Christ! Really dis­gusting if I get into elaborate details. I remember my trailer was set up in such a way that Cameron Diaz's and Lucy Liu's trailers were visible through my window, through this little shade I had. I'd put down the blackout shade just enough to have my eye peeping through and get them in my crosses. I'd be inside totally going at it. Just the thought of them changing in dieir trail­ers was enough to get me off Or I would steal Polaroids from the wardrobe people. I'd see a hot Polaroid of Drew Barrymore and go, "Hey, that's a cool picture. Can I have it?" And then I'd go into my trailer for a while. Drew Barrymore was the first crush I ever had. That movie Babes in lay-land—she was just so spunky. You never watched her and felt like shit afterward. Having her around was too much for me. I had a lot of time with myself on that set. PLAYBOY: Did your co-stars know you were in heat?

LABEOUF: Everybody knew. The girls knew, definitely. First of all, I'm a pretty forward guy. I'd tell them flat out, "I'm infatuated." They knew they were all my fantasy girls. Lucy Liu especially would play with me. She'd play with my mind. I was deep in puberty at this point. I'm raging. Hor­mones are flying off me. You could smell it. We'd all be doing a scene in Bosley's office, and Lucy would shift in her seat in a way that would let me see a litde too much thigh, or she'd cross her legs or do that torso twist that was just a litde bit too much. You know what the fuck I'm talking about. Bernie Mac understood what I was going through, and he'd look at me like, "Yeah, that's right. You just saw that shit." I mean, what are you supposed to do? You're 14, 15 years old, and you've got the fucking sexiest woman in the world sitting across from you, giving you the love. It was torture. But the best part was hanging out

with Bernie. He was teaching me how to be a card shark. Every time he would take out the cards, Lucy would wander over because she wanted to learn too. It quickly became apparent to me that being around Bernie meant being around Lucy, so need­less to say, Bernie and I became very tight buds. I miss the guy. I really do. PLAYBOY: How are women treating you these days, by the way? LABEOUF: Great. Amazing. Unbelievable. It's cool to be 22 and famous. You go to a party and it's a bit of an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's great, but it's strange. Going out in public, to an event or whatever, there's this third-person thing that hap­pens. Like when we were in Cannes for the premiere of Indiana Jones. The whole world had been waiting for the sequel to come out, and you're there with the squadron—the kill squad, I used to call it—Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford. And me. I'm like the water boy, but somehow the magic-rubs off and you find yourself at a party with beautiful women who want to get with you, and there are all kinds of people you can't believe you're seeing. Mick Jagger's there. Bono's there. Elton John's there. "Oh hi, Will." Will Smith! And in those moments I cease to be just Shia LaBeouf. It's not just me. It's Shia, this representative dude. And this rep­resentative dude gets a lot of attention. It's that Shia who gets the women rush­ing over. That can really fuck with your head. Oh, absolutely, it's exciting. It's intoxicating. But it's not real. That's not to say there aren't advantages to it or I haven't enjoyed myself. And certainly when you're with your boys, who are not normally approach artists, let's just say I make it very simple for them to be around women these days. PLAYBOY: Share with us the dream. What's it like to have women throw themselves at you?

LABEOUF: I remember a night not long after Disturbia came out. That's when the shit really hit. Disturbia had been number one for weeks, and we were filming Transform­ers. Before that, nobody really cared who I was. But suddenly there was a new energy around me. My phone was ringing like crazy. Friends from the past were calling, girlfriends from yesteryear, girlfriends from, you know, never, [laughs] Your whole world bubbles up. It's a volcano! One night up at the top of the Argyle Hotel, in Hollywood, I wasn't even 18 years old, but the things that were available in terms of astonishing temp­tations. Jesus! It's three in the morning, and you're looking at a Jacuzzi full of the most insanely beautiful women you've ever seen, and it's pretty much whatever you want. My problem was I wasn't very good at dosing the deal in those days. PLAYBOY: Has that skill improved? LABEOUF: Yes. Yes, most definitely. It changed after I had sex for the first time. PLAYBOY: When did that happen? LABEOUF: I was 18. That night was pretty

hysterical, actually. For some reason, I was trying to portray myself as a man who had done it many times in the past. I didn't tell the girl I was a virgin. I was all, "Don't worry, babe. I'm gonna handle it tonight," and, you know, "We're going to work this out. And the more we have sex, the more comfortable it'll become." And duh-duh-duh-duh. All this bullshit. And meanwhile I was shaking in my boots. playboy: What happened next? LABEOUF: She comes up to my hotel room in Montreal, and I'm pretending to be a stud. I was like, "Oh yeah, go lie down over there." She went and laid down. Getting naked was very strange. It was the first time I'd been naked in the light, in front of a girl, with no hiding place. It was like, boom, here I am. That was very nerve-racking. PLAYBOY: How did it go? LABEOUF: It became apparent pretty quickly that I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. Somewhere in her mind she had to know. I remember laying her on the bed and putting a pillow underneath her because I had seen that in a porn movie. I didn't know why they did it; I just figured you put a pillow under her hips to raise her up. My dad had told me the same thing. By the time you get to 18, all this mental prepa­ration has gone into losing your virginity. Plus, what a pro thing to do, right? [laughs] So I got her on the pillow, which put her at a weird angle where I couldn't get in cor­rectly. I'm not extremely well-endowed like some nine-inch superhero, and dearly this wasn't the move to do. I couldn't get my dick in, or it kept slipping out. Fortunately, she ended up being my girlfriend for three years, so we had time to work it out. We had a lot of sex and would read the Kama Sutra together and do the wildest shit you do when you're 18 and figuring out how to have sex with all four feet off the ground or some shit. The more you have sex, the more you learn about what works and what doesn't. The best sex is when you can be totally unself-conscious and try things. PLAYBOY: Like what? LABEOUF: Like playing with tempo. PLAYBOY: You mean alternating between fast and slow sex?

LABEOUF: Maybe. Or how about extraordi­narily slow sex? Like just staying in there. And from there do a major tempo shift and really go at it. The key is to be open to experimentation and to create an atmo­sphere that's safe and beautiful. Trust is so important in that kind of situation. PLAYBOY: Is it harder to trust women now that you're famous?

LABEOUF: Impossible. Once you're famous or have a lot of money, women will do prac­tically anything to get close to you. I hear stories about companies paying women to have sex with guys just to get a story for their magazine or website. Whether that's true or not, you do start looking at women like, Wait a minute. And then you have that skeptical 10 seconds after you meet someone, which kills all human

interaction. You know, trying to be dose to somebody—it's pretty tough. There are the women who know exacdy who I am but pretend they don't. The women who know exactly who I am but act jaded to seem cool. There are die women who come right out and say, "Do you want to get with me?" But those little sentences always start to surface: "I'm trying to get into the business," "I'd love to be in one of your movies." Everybody wants somediing from you, so it's confusing. At this point I don't diink I could ever randomly meet a woman and trust it completely. PLAYBOY: What's your policy on dating your co-stars?

LABEOUF: I know there's the "don't shit where you eat" type of diing, but the prob­lem is, movie sets are filled widi tons of attractive people. You know, you're making Transformers widi someone like Megan Fox, and she's a very attractive girl. Very attrac­tive, [laughs] And she's a very dose friend. But it hasn't been a romantic thing, because you're trying to respect the work environ­ment. You don't push anydiing. And widi sex and romance, things can become so convoluted so fast. On a big movie like that you're playing widi die devil. You have to weigh the risk-reward factor. Yes, the reward of being with Megan Fox would outweigh the risk, but it also becomes a risk for everyone else. You don't know what could happen. We could be shooting, and die relationship is suddenly on die rocks and dien what? So we just never ever did anything about it. We were very smart. We're attracted to each odier, and I think you can see that in our scenes together. It's very real and tangible, and you can tell somediing exists. But we never push it past that. It would also be such a high-profile relationship diat I'm not sure it would be enjoyable for us.

PLAYBOY: Fox recently broke off her engage­ment to actor Brian Austin Green. Does diat give you pause?

labeouf: [Laughs] Listen, I'm going to know the girl forever. She's a beauti­ful, intelligent girl, and when you make a movie with someone like that, who is around you all the time, you feel things. How can you not? You're human. I know a relationship between us isn't an option right now for a variety of reasons, and that's perfectly fine. I get to kiss her in die fantasy world, and diat's okay too. PLAYBOY: There were rumors about your dating Rihanna a while back. What's the truth on that?

LABEOUF: I attempted to. I was infatuated and made a few phone calls. She passed her number to a stylist friend of mine. I heard she was trying to get in contact widi me, and I was, like, Really? Rihanna? It was baffling to me. She's the sexiest pop star in the world, so it was outrageous to me. I remember I was shooting Indy in Hawaii at die time and filming a sword fight when I got die message. I said to myself, Can diis be my life? I kept telling my friends, "Dudes! I have Rihanna's number." They said, "Are

you kidding?" And I said, "No, I can text her right now." So I texted Rihanna, and we arranged to have dinner. PLAYBOY: How did it go? LABEOUF: It never got beyond one date. The spark wasn't there. We weren't pas­sionate about each other in that way, so we remain friends. It's funny how you can fall for an image that is projected and then discover how different the person is from who you thought they would be. I think we both experienced that. PLAYBOY: How did you feel when Rihanna was having problems with Chris Brown earlier this year?

LABEOUF: It's not my place to be involved in that, but yeah, that sucked. Of course it's painful and not just because she's a friend. For someone who loves women and grew up with women the way I did, it's hard to watch when someone isn't being treated right. But I don't like to comment when shit goes down with celebrities, because I used to be the guy who shit on people for getting into trouble. Rihanna's a beautiful, sexy girl, and let's leave it at that. PLAYBOY: Who else do you find sexy? LABEOUF: Oh, let's see. So many. Diane

Lane is hot. Ashley Judd. They're always sexy to me. I watched Total Recall recently, and Sharon Stone is unbelievable in that movie. It's a different kind of sexy, though. The sexy like Sharon Stone in Total Recall is kick-your-ass-give-you-sex-and-be-nice-to-you sexy. But then there's the sexy of a Natalie Portman or an Anne Hathaway, who are just perfection embodied. Majestic goddesses. For me, it switches all the time. Sometimes I'm interested in somebody at the Spearmint Rhino strip club, and some­times I go to the library. I'm all over the place. Probably the sexiest woman I know is my mother. She's an ethereal angel. Nobody looks like diat woman. If I could meet my mother and marry her, I would. I would be with my mother now, if she weren't my mother, as sick as diat sounds. PLAYBOY: Interesting. By the way, do you ever think about getting into therapy? LABEOUF: [Laughs] No. I don't know why. I just don't think I'm someone who needs to analyze every move I make. For me, I look at the shit I do and think, Okay, dearly this didn't work, but 70 percent of it is working, so we're still good. I fear a therapy situation would have me boxed into a certain type

of behavior—diat there's good and diere's bad, and I'm one way or the other. I like the ups and downs. I like running from extreme to extreme. I'm 22.1 don't need to have everything 6gured out at this point. PLAYBOY: If you could erase something you've done, what would it be? LABEOUF: I don't think I would. PLAYBOY: What about the night you were arrested in Walgreens? LABEOUF: No, man. I can't take it back. I learned shit from all that. Walgreens was—I don't know what it was, actually. But in my mind Walgreens was a joke. To me it was hysterical. I was wasted out of my mind. Most of the problems in my personal life happened when I was intoxi­cated in some way. But when I'm drunk, my mind stops, and it stopped that night. I was just being an idiot. I was wasted and I wanted to buy cigarettes, and I kept going back into the store even though die security dude had asked me to leave. PLAYBOY: When you feel out of control, does anything setde you down? LABEOUF: Besides work? I'll talk to my mom. My relationship with my parents is good these days. Mom will just let me talk and make me deal widi die silences. That helps. And Dad, you know, he has his issues. He sits in the garage, smokes weed, hangs out, relaxes, chills, paints. He's big into motorcycles. But we talk, we laugh. I'll tell you, the man has golden sperm. He got lucky having me as a kid, and he knows it. He appreciates dial. But beyond that, my biggest comfort right now is soul-searching. As cheesy as fuck as that sounds, religion has been interest­ing to me lately. Even though I'm Jewish and had a bar mitzvah, it's somediing I've never really looked at, never really put much behind. I've been propelled by self-motivation. But faidi is something else. PLAYBOY: Did you have a come-to-Jesus moment?

LABEOUF: No, no. Look, I'm not saying I'm a born-again. I'm not DMX. You won't see me coming out with a preacher film. I'm talking about opening doors to areas I have been closed off to. Thinking about things like prayer, like having faith that life will work out. I never really had much faith as a kid. Much of what I'm dealing with now is learning to be comfortable widi myself and where I'm headed. That requires me to sit and be with myself— without people around, widiout my head messed up on something. I'm not talking about meditation. Just being quiet with myself. The hardest Uiing in the world is being comfortable with myself. PLAYBOY: What went through your head when Headi Ledger killed himself? Do you understand die mind of a man like uSat? LABEOUF: I understand where that guy was. I never had diose dioughts, but after you get over the initial reaction people in my age group had—which was that we'd lost one of the pillars, we'd lost the Guy—you start to understand the white-(concluded on page 110)

SHIA LABEOUF

(continued from page 36) flag mentality. It starts legitimizing feelings. I'm not saying that would be a route I'd choose for myself, but what he did doesn't seem that far-fetched. There are ways, with all the pressure in this business, to get to a place like that. I've seen the door he walked through, you know what I'm saying? Fortu­nately, I can see that door and keep walk­ing, but I've seen it. I try not to get too dark. If I find I'm sinking, I'll get out and paint toilet seats or ride dirt bikes or shoot. Firing shotguns really helps me. PLAYBOY: Where do you do that? LABEOUF: Steven Spielberg takes me when he goes. We go to a place called Triple B's and skeel shoot. He's an Olympic shot. The hand-eye coordination of that man is unlike anything I've ever seen. I mean, if he weren't a great director, he could be one of our greatest snip­ers. I feel so fortunate for any time I get with Steven. It's one of those things 99.9 percent of the population only get to dream about. Like with the first Transformers, when Michael Bay wanted us to experience the full effect of the technology and sound of the film and brought us to a coliseum in Taormina, Italy to screen it in front of hundreds of screaming people. And you walk in and it's like Ben-Hur or some­thing. These people had never seen a movie like this, and to have a giant screen and the sound blasting and the whole coliseum shak­ing and then to have someone from the movie right there, it's an old-fashioned sort of thrill. Sometimes I can't figure out how I got into this secret community I always wanted to be part of. Outrageous. Just outrageous. These people I've always seen as godlike—Steven, George, Michael, Harrison—they're now part of my life, part of my history. PLAYBOY: It will be interesting to tell your kids about some day.

LABEOUF: I hope, yeah, I pray, man. lt"d be cool. 1 hope I'm still here in 10 years to tell them. I think about that sometimes when I see the hat that Harrison gave me. PLAYBOY: Which hat is that? LABEOUF: It's Harrison's hat from Indiana Jones.

PLAYBOY: Wow. Cool.

LABEOUF: Yeah. It has his sweat stains from the whole movie in it. We were way out somewhere at an airplane hangar on the last day of shooting, and he took the hat off his head, signed it and handed it to me. I didn't want to tell anyone about it at the time because I didn't want people to think, Oh, he's going to be the next Indy or that some sort of crown had been passed to me. That wasn't the point. PLAYBOY: What did it mean to you? LABEOUF: Well, when I looked at the hat I saw he had written something with a silver Sharpie. It said, "It's all yours now, kid— Harrison." And I know it's easy to perceive that as his handing the reins over to me on a franchise or whatever, but again, that's not it. First of all, Harrison isn't like that. He's so stoic, so John Wayne-ish. The whole idea of handing down a legacy would be such bullshit to him. What I read it as is "Keep your shit on." It was his way of saying "Life is going to get crazy now, so strap on tight, kid." And that's what I've found. When you're in a life situation like mine, it's hard to keep your head straight, because there are so many temptations, so many obsta­cles—unless you know the secret. PLAYBOY: So what is the secret? LABEOUF: Ha! Great question. I clearly don't have a secret. But if I find it, I'll be sure to let everyone know.

I'm not saying I'm a born-

again. I'm not DMX. I'm

talking about opening doors

to areas I have been closed

off to. Thinking about things

like prayer, like having faith.