Shia LaBeouf: Out of jail and onto a film set
Actor says new friendship with costar helped him recover
AUSTIN, TEXAS— There are dramatic storm clouds moving over the Texas state Capitol on a quiet Sunday morning in Austin.
A few blocks away, Shia LaBeouf is on a sixth-floor patio overlooking the historic landmark. He holds tight onto the arm of Zack Gottsagen, his costar in The Peanut Butter Fal
con, and touches his forehead onto Gottsagen’s shoulder.
As a photographer begins snapping pictures of the two, LaBeouf picks up energy, encouraging Gottsagen. LeBeouf asks, “Are you ready?”
He grabs a phone from someone and pulls up an ’N Sync track, and the two start to dance together. Briefly, they both seem unburdened, free.
“This is your moment,” LaBeouf says to Gottsagen. “We did it for this moment.”
It may seem unusual to find a Hollywood star who has become as well-known for his headline-making behaviour off-screen as his impassioned performances on-screen, seeming to give so much of himself to a 33-year-old aspiring actor from Florida with Down syndrome.
But Shia LaBeouf is anything but predicable.
The Peanut Butter Falcon, the debut feature written and directed by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, is something of a contemporary folk ballad, a modern-day Mark Twain adventure fable set along the outer banks of North Carolina, amid retirement homes, blind pastors, crab fishermen, homemade liquor and a cobbled-to- gether raft.
In the film, Gottsagen plays a young man with Down syndrome who is forced to live in a retirement home.
Frustrated by his life there, he breaks out, going in search of his hero, a wrestler named the Salt Water Redneck.
Along the way he encounters a man who is himself also on the run, played by LaBeouf, and the two set off on a makeshift raft together.
The supporting cast includes Dakota Johnson, Bruce Dern, John Hawkes, Thomas Haden Church and real-life wrestlers Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Mick Foley.
It was while filming The Pea- nut Butter Falcon in Georgia in the summer of 2017 that LaBeouf was arrested for public drunkenness and video footage of LaBeouf making sexist and racist comments to police officers was released.
LaBeouf, now 32, has since gotten sober and publicly apologized for his behaviour.
In a Q&A after the film’s world première Saturday night in Austin, LaBeouf described himself as feeling “fragile” while making the movie.
Though he seemed wary of the spotlight for himself, waving away a microphone at one point before later reluctantly taking hold of one to answer a question, when someone from the audience declared that Gottsagen was a star, LaBeouf lit up.
In an interview on Sunday alongside Gottsagen, who received a standing ovation at the première, LaBeouf did not shy away from talking about his personal troubles during production on the movie, addressing them without even being asked.
“You know, I have my own issues, but when we were filming, I basically hit bottom barrel, and then the next day I had to show up on our life raft with him and no irony in it,” LaBeouf said.
“That’s actually what our truth was.
“I got out of jail, walked onto a film set. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Everybody was looking down, and me and him had to go get on a raft and film the rest of the movie. And it was insane. It was just nuts.”
The pair’s on-screen connection has a warmth and intensity that seem to exist off-screen as well.
“I was what changed his life around, just so you know,” Gottsagen said. “Shia has struggled and been through bad times, and I was what changed his life around to make it better. Not everything is bad.”
“You don’t know how important that is to have a cheerleader when the world is like ‘you’re ... lame’ and no one wants to look at you,” LaBeouf said, getting visibly emotional and wiping a tear from his eye.
As to what specifically Gottsagen did or said to turn things around for him, LaBeouf said, “No judgment. Just always straight love. No second-guessing.
“He tells you straight up; he’s a truth barometer,” LaBeouf continued. “He’s the straightest shooter.”
It was during a court-ordered rehab after his arrest that LaBeouf wrote Honey Boy, the semi-autobiographical story that premièred earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival in which LaBeouf plays a variation on his own father during LaBeouf’s childhood acting career. (LaBeouf said he actually got an extension on going to rehab to allow him to finish shooting on The Peanut Butter Falcon.)
LaBeouf declared the movie “one of my favourite things I ever did,” even though with all the personal travails he went through during the production, it would be easy to understand if he would want to put the movie far behind him.