LaBeouf’s inner rage

Shia LaBeouf is trying to get to the root of his anger problems, said Eric Sullivan in Esquire. The hotheaded actor has been involved in public meltdowns that have led to speculation about his mental health—culminating last July in a court-ordered spell in rehab for a drunken altercation with police in Savannah. “I’ve been falling forward for a long time—most of my life,” he says. “The truth is, in my desperation, I lost the plot.” During therapy in rehab, LaBeouf, 31, realized that his rage dates back to his turbulent childhood in California. “They said I had PTSD,” he says. LaBeouf’s father, Jeffrey, was a Vietnam vet who struggled with heroin addiction. By the time he was 3, his father had left—leaving mom Shayna to fend for the two of them in Tujunga, the bikergang capital of San Fernando Valley. One day, when LaBeouf was 9, he heard a man raping his mother. From that point onward, it would take very little to trigger him. “The first time I got arrested, it stemmed from the same s---. Some guy bumped into my mother’s car with his car in a parking lot, and my head went right to ‘You need to avenge your mother! So I went after the dude with a knife.” To this day, LaBeouf still sleeps with a gun. “I’ve always thought somebody was coming in. My whole life.”