Latest news with #HenryJohnson
Geek Tyrant
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Shia LaBeouf Saddles Up for Crime Thriller Film GOD OF THE RODEO — GeekTyrant
Shia LaBeouf is set to star in God of the Rodeo , a new crime thriller written and directed by Father Stu filmmaker Rosalind Ross. The movie is set in Louisiana's infamous Angola Prison in 1967, God of the Rodeo tells the story of Buckkey, 'a hardened inmate serving a life sentence who finds a glimmer of redemption in an unlikely opportunity: the prison's first-ever inmate rodeo. 'As Buckkey and his fellow inmates prepare for a last grasp at glory, they're confronted with the reality that the rodeo is nothing more than a gladiatorial showcase — a grueling fight for survival designed to satiate the public's bloodlust and fulfill the warden's delusion of godliness." The film is based on journalist Daniel Bergner's real-life reporting from inside the prison which was one the most violent prisons in the American South. Giannina Scott is producing through her Cara Films label, with Ridley Scott and Michael Pruss on board via Scott Free Films. It sounds like exactly the kind of role that will give LaBeouf space to go unhinged, soulful, and unpredictable, as he likes to do with the films he stars in. LaBeouf's been keeping busy. He's currently on screen in Salvable , a Lionsgate drama about a washed-up boxer trying to fix things with his estranged daughter. He's also in David Mamet's Henry Johnson , which adapts Mamet's 2023 play and puts LaBeouf in the middle of a moral tailspin. God of the Rodeo doesn't have a release date yet, but it sounds like it will be a great project for LaBeouf to take on. Source: Deadline
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Slauson Rec' Review: A Documentary About Shia LaBeouf's Acting Class — and His Anger Issues — Is More Appalling Than Fascinating
'Slauson Rec,' a documentary starring Shia LaBeouf and his mental trauma, is not a good movie. But it's a timely artifact of one of the things movies are now up against — a pathological and vampiristic celebrity culture that sucks all the air out of the room. In 2018, LaBeouf posted a video on Twitter announcing the formation of a free weekly theater workshop that would meet every Saturday at the Slauson Recreation Center in South Central Los Angeles. Hundreds of people showed up for it, lured by the magnet of LaBeouf's name. One of them was Leo Lewis O'Neil, a young man who wasn't interested in being an actor but who volunteered to record the workshop on camera. Over the next three years, he shot hundreds of hours of footage of LaBeouf and his followers doing their experimental theater thing, writing and rehearsing several 'plays' they presented in a nightclub and, ultimately, in a dusty parking lot. The movie O'Neil has put together out of this footage, which premiered last night at Cannes, is by any real-world standard a slovenly and undisciplined piece of work. 'Slauson Rec' is two-and-a-half hours long, and it's little more than an endless dispiriting diary-like ramble. Yet it also functions as a vérité exploitation film, since the only thing in it that's actually interesting is watching Shia LaBeouf parade himself as a kind of acting guru and mentor, only to descend into an increasingly furious and abusive and unhinged place that leaves us with the profound question, 'What in the fuck's name is going on here?' More from Variety Wes Anderson Mocks Trump's Movie Tariffs at Cannes: 'Can You Hold Up the Movie in Customs? It Doesn't Ship That Way' Wes Anderson Powers Satyajit Ray's 'Aranyer Din Ratri' Rescue for Cannes Classics BrLab Unveils New Dates, Co-Pro Forum and Regional Spread Ahead of 15th Anniversary Edition (EXCLUSIVE) Let's be clear: Shia LaBeouf is not just someone in deep need of anger-management therapy. He's an extraordinarily gifted actor (I was reminded of this just a couple of weeks ago, when I reviewed his forceful performance in the David Mamet film 'Henry Johnson'), and he's also the definition of a charismatic person. In 'Slauson Rec,' whether he's being supportive or hellacious, you can't take your eyes off him. He's got a stare of burning intensity and a hyper-articulate blunt showmanship that grows out of that quality. (He also has a penchant for sporting facial hair that looks like it came out of a costume shop.) In the documentary, he is always on, always making everything about him, with the underlying conviction that he's the most arresting person in the room. Early on, we give him the benefit of the doubt, since he seems to be employing his charisma in a generous way (volunteering his time to inspire a bunch of people in South Central). His volatile acting-coach showmanship feels like it's part of a tradition, stretching all the way back to Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and incorporating the exhibitionistic ethos of the let-it-all-hang-out, acting-as-self-actualization thing that defined the experimental theater movements of the late '60s and '70s. The Slauson Rec theater experiment, as LaBeouf explains it, is an attempt to gather people together and give them a club, a community, an artistic laboratory, a family. And in the eagerness of the participants to go along with whatever LaBeouf says, we feel the desperate hunger they have to belong. LaBeouf isn't just showing them how to act. He's giving them hope. From the start, though, you may wonder what, exactly, he's out to accomplish creatively. He talks a good game, like a theatrical cult leader, but he has the participants doing 'devised theater,' which after a while seems to come down to a kind of ritual group body-tapping and choreographed aerobics. It looks like they're doing an elaborate series of warm-up exercises, which is fine in the early weeks, when they're just getting to know each other. But once they've been at this for months, it starts to become clear that LaBeouf doesn't really have a plan. He's just throwing stuff against the wall, using his heady psychodramatic acting-coach jargon and tough-love 'I'm doing this for you!' personality to turn anything and everything into an 'encounter session.' And given that these are not professional actors, or even (in most cases) people who aspire to be, LaBeouf's words to them, full of deadly serious jabber about empathy and ego, are pumped up with an intensity that feels overdone and inappropriate. And that's before he starts blowing his fuse. Once the pandemic hits, the Slauson Recreation Center tosses the group out (at this point, they've melted down to about 50 people), and they wind up rehearsing with masks under the hot L.A. sun in an anonymous dusty parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, with two tables under a red tent. The place becomes their sunlit prison (and ours). They've already put on one 'play,' which looks, from what we see of it, like a glorified hip-hop open-mic night. Now they're writing and rehearsing a follow-up, some sort of multimedia action-theater piece entitled '5711 Avalon,' though the film never gives us a halfway coherent idea of what it is. Yet the more sketchy and aimless the Slauson Rec troupe becomes, the more LaBeouf seizes onto the notion that the members are not living up to what they're supposed to be doing. They're disappointing him (but only because he cares so much). He targets one member, a 22-year-old kid named Zeke, who seems like the sweetest guy, and LaBeouf starts to torment him like a drill sergeant who has picked out his patsy. 'Don't play that fuckin' James Dean shit with me, dude,' he says. He also says things like, 'I love you if you make my life better. If you make my life worse, I don't love you. That's how I'm built' and 'This is really the last of the refinements! You really need to pay attention to this shit' and 'I said giggle! What fuckin' version of what the fuck I said is what the fuck you did?' LaBeouf declares in the movie that he's an alcoholic, and he talks, at one point, about how he's always beating himself up in his own brain. But that's not exactly reassuring. He's got his shirt off a lot, baring the wall of chest tattoos he got to make the movie 'The Tax Collector,' and we start to notice that he's shouting all the time, as if the fate of the world were hanging on how effectively he can get this ragtag bunch of people to act. Yet we can't even tell the difference between if they're doing it well or doing it badly. And that's part of what's so destabilizing about LaBeouf's rants, his tantrums, his meltdowns. It's not just that he's being abusive toward these people (at several points physically). It's that the whole damn spectacle of it starts to feel pointless. The 'point,' of course, is that we're getting to watch a well-known star in a state of breakdown. And the tabloid perversity of 'Slauson Rec' is that even when he's acting out, being a total dick to these hapless people who have put their trust in him, the movie is busy turning his self-destruction into theater. Just when we think his abuse of poor Zeke can't get any worse, LaBeouf turns his attention to Sarah, a troupe member whose mother is sick. He starts to berate her, and after her mother has died he informs her that he wants her to stop playing the role in their play she's been playing, because he has decided that she's 'not right for the part.' In this meaningless shambolic parking-lot-theater mess? That he would say that is worse than harsh — to our eyes, it's sadistic. And it just makes us think: Why are we even watching this? I would wager that the commercial prospects for 'Slauson Rec' will fall somewhere between dim and zero. The filmmaking, which just drags on (with helpful titles like 'Day 56,' followed by 'Day 57'), saps the energy right out of you. Yet the movie has the clueless arrogance to present itself as a redemption narrative — not for the members of the Slauson Rec troupe, but for Shia LaBeouf. After he is hit with a legal accusation of domestic abuse, he simply abandons the troupe. He doesn't show up one day, and that's it, it's over. But the film ends on an interview with LaBeouf, conducted more recently, where he sits in a chair in the tasteful home he shares with Mia Goth and their child, and he goes back over the Slauson Rec experiment and admits that he'd gone off the deep end. He admits that his behavior was untenable, and that he had a 'God complex.' He now feels bad about all of it. LaBeouf delivers this confession with an eloquent conviction that's a little uncanny. But listening to it, you realize that one thing hasn't changed, and that it may be the most unnerving thing about him: He's still acting. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
David Mamet On Return To Cinema With Self-Distributed ‘Henry Johnson', State Of The Industry & J.K. Rowling-Inspired Play He's Writing For Rebecca Pidgeon
We kick off the 2025 summer season of the Crew Call podcast with a candid, wide-ranging conversation with Pulitzer-winning playwright and two-time Oscar nominee David Mamet. Mamet has directed a new movie, Henry Johnson, his first in 12 years, based on his 2023 play that premiered in Venice, CA. The pic, which is self-distributed and available to rent digitally, follows the title character (played by Mamet's son-in-law, Evan Jonigkeit), who after helping a friend out becomes collateral damage and complicit in his sex crime affairs. This leads Henry Johnson to jail. He looks to authority figures he encounters along the way including his eventual cellmate, Gene (Shia LaBeouf). Henry's journey leads him down a road of manipulation and ethical uncertainty. More from Deadline Shia LaBeouf Stage Debut In David Mamet Play 'Henry Johnson' Extends Run – Update 'Glengarry Glen Ross' Broadway Review: Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr & Bob Odenkirk Break Bad In Unmissable Succession Of Cutthroats All-Female 'Glengarry Glen Ross' Expected For Broadway Following Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk & Bill Burr Limited Engagement We talk with Mamet about the origins of Henry Johnson, LaBeouf's sublime performance (and how Mamet doesn't believe in method actors), the state of the motion picture industry and how streaming is killing it, and his wisdom when it comes to self-distribution. 'Anyone can make a movie and distribute it and take their chances,' says Mamet. 'Your chances of people seeing that movie are not less than your chances of going to offices in Hollywood for 10 years to convince some f*cking idiot to look at your work.' Also, it's been a while since we've seen Mamet pen a big studio movie, ala his previous event movies such as The Untouchables, Hannibal, The Verdict and Ronin. Why? Well, when studios want to hire Mamet, they have to follow his rules: 'Give me a lot of money and feel free to f*ck it up of which I'm going to hell, or give me enough money to get the movie made, have me submit my director's fee and leave me alone. Both of these things were acceptable. Only one of those things were normal, but both them were acceptable.'We also chat about the buzzed-about female stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross ('We did a reading a few years ago, Rebecca Pidgeon played Ricky Roma, and Felicity Huffman played Shelley Levene); his Harvey Weinstein-inspired play Bitter Wheat and why it never made it to Broadway ('Broadway has become very, very problematical, and it was the height of the woke insanity and the thought of doing a comedy about guy who was a libertine, as if Moliere never existed, was thought not quite the thing), and what he really thinks of the now incarcerated mogul. Also, what's next: 'I'm writing a play for Rebecca about these two women who need to kill J.K. Rowling. I'm writing a screenplay now and I think I might have found some suckers to give me a couple of bucks to make it, about a couple of old confidence men, who got jammed up, and have to resort to some odd measures to take a mark to the cleaners.' Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt Denzel Washington's Career In Pictures: From 'Carbon Copy' To 'The Equalizer 3'
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Shia LaBeouf and David Mamet Just Might Save Each Other
On May 9, David Mamet's first directorial film effort in nearly 20 years, Henry Johnson, will be available for streaming on The film is a straightforward adaptation of Mamet's own play, mounted at a black box theater in Venice in 2023 — garnering plenty of acclaim for both the writer and star Shia LaBeouf. The timing could not be better for LaBeouf, 38, a highly gifted, scandal-prone actor who currently finds his nose pressed against the Hollywood glass amid fallout from a number of controversies. Not the least of them is a pending lawsuit from former girlfriend FKA Twigs accusing him of sexual assault and emotional distress. LaBeouf has conceded to harmful behavior but denies the specific allegations and the matter is set to proceed to trial in September of this year. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Henry Johnson' Review: Shia LaBeouf and Evan Jonigkeit Are Riveting in David Mamet's Dark Study of Puppet Masters and Pawns 'Salvable' Review: Toby Kebbell and Shia LaBeouf in a Boxing Drama That Transcends Its Familiarity 'Glengarry Glen Ross' Theater Review: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr Bristle With Cutthroat Rivalry in Punchy David Mamet Revival In Henry Johnson, he plays Gene, a fast-talking and hyper-intelligent prisoner under whose spell the title character — a white-collar dupe played by Evan Jonigkeit, husband of Mamet's actress daughter Zosia — helplessly falls. LaBeouf — who since 2022 has raised a daughter with actress girlfriend Mia Goth, currently filming Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey — is again drawing raves for his performance in the film version, with The Hollywood Reporter noting in its review that the 'hint of madness and lurking danger that adrenalize so many of the actor's best performances' makes him a perfect fit for the role. Mamet, 77, is certainly no stranger to controversy himself. The celebrated writer-director, whose Glengarry Glen Ross is currently in its fourth incarnation on Broadway (this one starring Bob Odenkirk, Kieran Culkin and Bill Burr), has made few friends and more than a few enemies in Hollywood as he has repeatedly professed allegiance to Donald Trump and all that he stands for. Two Hollywood outcasts joining forces for — to the surprise of many — some of the best work of their careers? To learn how it all came together, THR sat for lunch with both men at the Smoke House Restaurant in Burbank (Shia ordered clam chowder and a shrimp cocktail, David the chopped sirloin) for a conversation as mesmerizing as anything Gene could subject Henry Johnson to inside a cramped jail cell. Shia, we've been in the same room only once before. Remember your ? Anyone could walk into a room and sit across a table from you. Alone. There was a paper bag over your head, with holes cut out for the eyes. I was one of the first ones there. DAVID MAMET What did you do when you got in the room? I couldn't believe it was happening. It all felt very surreal. And I wasn't sure it was Shia, either. MAMET Because of the bag. Right. So I just had some awkward conversation with him and tried to engage him, but he wasn't talking. And then that was it. I was escorted out. SHIA LABEOUF Dave, I've read American Buffalo-era interviews where you were not a big fan of performance art. MAMET That was even prior to that. In the '60s, I was working and living in New York, and all this stuff was happening down on the Bowery, on St. Mark's Place. I didn't get it. LABEOUF Yeah, no, I understand. I went through my own process and wound up in a similar spot. I heard that art piece went off the rails because people were harassing and molesting you. LABEOUF But we planned for all that. People are going to take things to an extreme. You give people enough rope, that's how it goes. It went haywire twice, but somebody would step in. Somebody was trying to whip my legs, and there was nudity and things like that. I just don't know the intrinsic value of such a thing. That was one in a series of performance art pieces you had done. LABEOUF Man, I've been searching for a long time. I'm really like a pure actor. When I was young, I didn't think that I required much help to do what I do. I was completely narcissistic and fearful and had a lack of trust. I've been under the tutelage of a lot of dudes who tried to mentor me, but I just didn't trust them, or didn't like what they made or whatever. It could be as simple as somebody's hairstyle — it really gets down to petty stuff like that. If you're going to give somebody the keys and let them drive your life, which is what it feels like when you're in this kind of relationship, you want to trust them. How was David's hairstyle — or his directing style in general? LABEOUF The ultimate, and I'm not just saying that because he's right there. It's precise and it's also hands off enough to let you play jazz within the thing. So it's not Oliver Stone where I'm going through each punctuation [making 2010's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps]. And please, this is not a slight on that man. I have deep love for him. But it's a different thing. You seem like birds of a feather in that you're both pretty rebellious. It makes sense to me that you would eventually find each other. So how did you find each other? LABEOUF I wrote him a fan letter. I've been chasing him for 10 years. Sometimes he's making something and there's a spot for me. And then we're in conversation and the thing goes another way. Like this JFK thing [Assassination, about how Chicago mobster Sam Giancana arranged the assassination of John F. Kennedy], is the most recent example. I was prepping to play Lee Harvey Oswald. Viggo Mortensen signed on. We were ready to go. Then I get a heartfelt call from Dave, and I never heard him sound like that. It was like heartbreak. Somebody took his kid from him. I don't know really what happened, but I know that they pushed him out. It's like, man, how do I make this dude I love feel better? What happened to the JFK project, David? MAMET They decided that instead of making the movie, they wanted to sue each other. So they started suing each other. Everybody was in it. Courtney Love was in it. John Travolta. Al Pacino. LABEOUF It was a sick cast. It would've been crazy. MAMET Louis C.K. was going to play Jack Ruby. Shia, you mentioned writing a fan letter to David. What did you say in the fan letter? LABEOUF See, I had met Pacino. Pacino and I were going to do a play on Broadway called Orphans. And I'm scared. I'm just Transformers boy, who was raised by Spielberg through the Disney thing. I got all my fears: 'You ain't earned it.' And you hang out with Gary Oldman [on the set of 2012's Lawless and 2016's Man Down]. And you're hanging out with John Hurt [on the set of 2008's New York, I Love You and Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull]. And Hurt is telling you all about Oscar Wilde. And you're like, 'I don't fuck with Oscar Wilde.' You feel like you're not a part of it. I've had that feeling for a long time. It's this deep sense that I'm not enough, or whatever. And Dave's books helped me with that. Like True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. I knew that book because John Hurt had told me that the Stanislavsky thing was bullshit. We were doing Indiana Jones. Ray Winstone was there. I'm scared. I'm just lucky to be around these people — still a CW kid. And they put me onto that book. It made me feel like acting is actually an accessible thing. I don't have to have some magical power. Basically, if I work hard, I can have it. That's what the book said to me. People say I'm a method actor. I'm not at all. I'm a grinder. That book is my only acting teacher. So while I was prepping with Pacino, he'd say he became what he is on American Buffalo. So I had written Dave a letter at some point and put a stupid script in with it. This is back when I was trying to be a screenwriter — and all the hoopla that went on with the plagiarism and all this stuff. I'm looking for heroes. I didn't get a response back. But then I hear from him a year later, for this TV show about Chicago he was developing. MAMET Oh yeah. Shia, if I recall, you dropped out of . Something about not getting along with co-star Alec Baldwin? LABEOUF By the time Baldwin got there, it was almost unfair. So he's dealing with both my fractured little weak ego, right? All this hard prep that I'd done for two years, and my desperate need to show him all my prep, or that he would accept me somehow. I was so insecure. Well, that got contentious in the room. Then he got competitive. That's just what our relationship turned into. I'd be off book, he'd be on book, and he didn't want me to look at him be off book. That makes it hard to play these scenes out or block this thing even. And no fault against him, he had two weeks to come in because Pacino [dropped out]. I had built the whole thing based on my relationship with Pacino. And that's gone. So I was kind of heartbroken. When he came in, I'm living in the park and I'm on steroids and I'm not in a good way. You were living in a park? LABEOUF Yeah. I was sleeping in Central Park. They keep horses there at this little fire basin. And there's a whole lot of room around there where you can just chill. You got to move every three or four hours and the guy comes around, but you can spend most of your time there. And then you'd show up for rehearsal, having slept in Central Park? LABEOUF For most of the prep. Wow. LABEOUF Right. And then Alec started teaching at NYU — a class on acting while I was doing these rehearsals with him. And I was like, 'How? You're still not off book!' So then I started taking his class. It got insane. But me and him are good because he's gone through a lot. I've gone through a lot. We've both been able to send each other love and make it right before all the madness happened on both sides. We made it right. He's a good guy. He's just like me. Fear will make you move different. I found it came from having absolutely no spiritual life. MAMET That'll do it. LABEOUF It made me a piece of shit. Not a nice guy. And last we talked, . How's that going? LABEOUF It changes the way you work, for sure. Me and Alec would never have these problems now. But I was in an island. Then I hear Timothée Chalamet get up and he says something like, 'I want to be great.' I so know the feeling. On him, it's cute. On me, it wasn't cute. You know what I'm saying? Let's get into . David, I read one glowing review that guessed it was an older script that you had resurrected. When did you write ? MAMET I wrote it at the end of COVID. My friend Marja-Lewis Ryan, who has directed a couple of plays of mine, said, 'What are you doing?' 'I'm sitting at home. I'm licking my wounds. I'll never fucking work again. Nobody wants to do my plays, blah, blah, blah.' She said, 'Well, let's do something. Don't you have anything?' So I sent her this play. And she said, 'OK, we're going to do it. We'll put it together. We'll do it over at the Electric Lodge in Venice.' LABEOUF And I called Dave around then, because I'm still heartbroken over losing Lee Harvey Oswald. I said, 'Where are you going?' Because everybody was falling off the project. And then Evan called me and talked me into it, because I didn't think I could do it. MAMET My son-in-law, Evan Jonigkeit. Was it always a given that Evan would play Henry Johnson? MAMET I wrote it for him. Your wife Rebecca Pidgeon starred on stage in and in several of your films. Why do you like working with immediate family? MAMET I knew Jim Gandolfini. We were going to do a project together called The Lake. It was a Chicago cop story. We were sitting having lunch. It was like a week before he died. He said, 'The thing about a movie is by the time you figure out how to make the movie, it's over. You're done shooting it. But when you got a TV show, you got the second family and you're figuring it out.' So I've always worked with the same people — because why not? Shia, what's it like to speak David Mamet's dialogue? LABEOUF It's a fucking relief. It's being able to say, 'I can't fuck this up.' I haven't gone to school, college, nothing like that. I've just read scripts since I'm eight years old. He's the best. I'm not some intellectual. I'm just a guy who likes acting. I'm a performance whore. And there's no one better for the actor. You don't have to work so much. The reason you get all these actors inserting the 'ums' and the 'ahs' is because the writing sucks. MAMET You got to say the words. And sometimes it's hard to say the words. LABEOUF They try to box him in by calling it 'Mamet-esque speak' or whatever. But there is another thing in film — this New York-esque mumblecore bullshit. And it's everywhere. And so then you read a Mamet play and there's none of it. You have to unlearn a lot of things. MAMET I do one take. The more takes you do, the more it takes. You have to look at the footage until you don't know what the fuck you're looking at. Most directors don't talk. They say, 'Let's do it again.' The question is why? So if you don't know why, the actor is just thinking, 'Fuck, I better do something different. He didn't like that other thing.' LABEOUF When I worked with Adam Driver, we're on the Megalopolis set. Coppola is filming and Adam will do a take and then he'll go back and watch playback on the monitor. That's his way. But what that is is a lack of trust. I used to be that guy, too. Your performance in was really out there. What was Coppola's direction for that character? LABEOUF Coppola thinks he's Dave. He really believes he's this theater director guy. He's not. But he believes he is. He thinks he's the actor's guy — but he's not. That's not to say he's not incredible, it's just not what his incredible is. It's not helpful to the actor to get overt notes. He gave you a lot of direction? LABEOUF He was very specific, but his specificity wasn't on the page. So I can't share your dream. With Coppola, a lot needs to be talked about. Maybe it's just the movie that I worked on him with, but it felt like we had to mine his mind to figure out what the fuck we were even talking about. It wasn't normal language. It was this archaic rhythm that he was chasing. So it became a lot of questions on my end, which required answers, which frustrated our relationship. I became a nuisance. And when you finally saw the finished product, was it what you thought you were making? LABEOUF It's further than what I thought he was chasing. It is way wackier than I thought. It's wacky as fuck. I never thought we were going for wacky. I thought my character was wacky and I served that for the film. But I didn't think the whole movie was wacky. There were scenes where I remember watching Driver and thinking like, 'Whoa, that's wild. Now we're playing the same person?' Aubrey Plaza was playing it almost like she was winking at the crowd, like she was in on this joke. That wasn't my bag. I remember early on being very scared about what Coppola had given me because it didn't make sense to me and I didn't feel comfortable. And I had done one rehearsal and he gave me a look — and I never asked him another question about the character. But he was getting questions from Driver that would exhaust him. Driver needed answers, too. So by the time he was available to me, the energy was different. And I had to be respectful about all that. You want to be respectful, but you want to be good. David, you've never been a big fan of critics. MAMET Well, no. I met a couple critics in my life who were very, very helpful to me. But basically other than that, I stopped reading them decades ago. So when you mounted in Venice, did you invite critics? LABEOUF Dave said no. There was a whole internal thing for a week and a half with me and Evan. It was strictly no critics, which for me, my ego wasn't going to have that. I had worked too hard. I just wasn't going to have it. MAMET Because we were selling every ticket that we could. Was there maybe a bit of fear there, that they wouldn't like the piece? MAMET No, I just fucking hate them. The old saying is, 'What's the only requirement to be a drama critic? It's insufficient talent to write about sports.' LABEOUF I ninja'd behind Dave's back and invited the writer from the LA Times. I said, 'Hey, I know Dave doesn't want you there, but wear a wig and come anyway. I'll put a ticket at the front.' So he came and he saw it and he liked it. MAMET I just didn't want to pay him the compliment of buying him a ticket. Let me ask a bit about the content of the play. David, you said you wrote it during the pandemic. What was on your mind? MAMET A lot of theaters become political and social. So the plays are social commentary, political commentary. Deaf people are people, too. Black people are people, too. Gay people are people, too. But real art is quite the contrary. It's saying, 'I'm going to write about something that puzzles the hell out of me.' The question from the beginning is this guy Henry Johnson, who's a little bit of a codependent and the fool, he always thinks he's doing the right thing. But what he's doing is two things: He's always injuring someone and he's always being taken advantage of. So I wanted to follow that to its end result. People are saying it's a very timely film. Why? MAMET They like it. That's all timely means, right? They say, 'Hey, geez — I'm alive now. This film's alive now. I guess it must be timely.' So there's nothing in the air about people having the wool pulled over their eyes and being easily duped or conned? MAMET Well, it's always in the air, right? Somebody said the Bible isn't about what happened. The Bible is about what always happens. That's why we're still reading the Bible. I've seen Shia's character compared to these toxic-masculine guru guys online. MAMET I don't understand what toxic masculinity means. I mean, I know the words, but I don't know what it means. I think it means I don't like men. It means it's a good idea not to like men. Shia, what's your take on your character? Is Gene a master manipulator or something less sinister? LABEOUF I don't want to be in prison. I don't have to work hard to understand that. Who would want to be in prison for 30 fucking years? If there was a way out, I would try to chase that. I don't need to do big research to think that way. And I didn't really want to play him like tough guy, because all my baggage came in with me already. I knew as soon as the play would start, there was all this myth already about how I'm a dog-killing, monstrous piece of shit. And so how can I paint with that? Well, I don't have to play into it or use it very much or do much grimacing at all. I just have to get these lines down, learn this rhythm. How does a story like this even come to your desk? You shouldn't be talking to us, right? We're not supposed to be here. This is for The Hollywood Reporter, isn't it? Yeah. LABEOUF Well, at least from what I've experienced lately, is you guys aren't allowed to come write about me, right? Why not? LABEOUF Because we're on some kind of lists. For instance, I was going to do Jimmy Kimmel, right? To promote this project. And so Jimmy Kimmel's show is owned by ABC. And ABC said, 'No, you can't interview Shia.' So Jimmy had to call me and say, 'Hey, you can't come on the show.' So I imagine The Hollywood Reporter is quite corporate that way as well. If you have a story you're interested in, you have to go get permission, don't you? We're a news outlet. We get more leeway. LABEOUF Well, I imagine any kind of corporate media would have a problem with you interviewing me. For sure. It's crazy. Is it that just you've been over there for a long time? I don't know, really. I wanted to interview you, so I'm interviewing you. Let me ask you this: You've said a few times today that you're a narcissist. Do you really think that? LABEOUF To get into this field, there's a certain level of ego — a certain ego sickness that gets you into acting. And now I'm trying to figure out what the healthy version of that looks like. MAMET Yeah, but what's wrong with that? LABEOUF It just is what it is. MAMET I was talking to a doctor one day about surgery, a good doctor friend of mine. He says, 'What's the most important thing that motivates a surgeon?' I said, 'Trying to save lives?' 'No.' 'Trying to perfect his skill?' He said, 'No. The most important thing that motivates a surgeon is they like cutting people open.' So that's what I feel. They like cutting people open and we like getting up in front of people and torturing ourselves. Shia, are you still in touch with Mel Gibson? LABEOUF Yeah. Very close. Big respect, big love. He's always been very lovely to me. He held my hand when I was really shitting on myself. Dude really stepped up for me in big ways. Him, Sean Penn, James Brolin — these guys got me to sobriety. They got around me and kept me alive. Sean also showed up and motivated me to do this as a play. I was scared as fuck when this thing started. He was there week one. Sam Rockwell came. There was a bunch of guys that I looked up to that just started popping up. I had never, ever felt that kind of love — not like that. Do you feel like this part could be a sort of gateway to rehabilitation for you? LABEOUF I hope so. I hope my whole life is about that. I hope my whole life is squaring things, getting it right. It's what I want to do with the rest of my life. And there's a lot of things to get right. I'm blessed that I still have this craft and I'm still allowed to do it at a high level with the highest. It feels like a fucking miracle. It's all part of the same thing — God's everything or nothing. I believe that. Me and Dave have big God talks. I've been to temple with him. He's been to church with me. Been deep dives for both of us. MAMET You can't trust your mind. The mind is the serpent in the garden. The mind is evil and it has to be controlled. How do you control it? We try to do good. We do evil. So I'm getting a cup of tea in the morning and there's the Torah sitting over there. And I say, 'You know, I really should read the Torah.' It's an unusual thing you're doing with the film's release. David, it's funny you should mention Louis C.K. earlier. He was the first person I thought of when I heard you're putting it online at . Louis used to put his specials up there, five bucks a pop. MAMET He's a big, big reason this happened. I asked him, 'What's the secret?' He said there's no secret. He said, 'I'm going to call my guy for all my online stuff. He'll talk you through it.' And so between that and Evan, who can figure out anything, we said, 'OK. Duh.' The industry died, right? It just aged out, just like radio drama aged out because of new technology. The film industry has aged out because of the internet. The industry so aged out that they're making Snow White for $250 million and nobody came to see it. Because the decisions are being made by an industry that's too rich to fail. Just like the Biden administration, they got to keep doing this stuff. Although it's absurd and it's making us bankrupt. I was having the best time in my life and I was doing the best theater happening in the English-speaking world in 1975 in a garage in Chicago. So now we're trying to do the same thing. You might make money and you might not, but you're living your life. You aren't asking permission of 8,500 cocksuckers named Jason in the Valley over here. David, you got a lot of heat for supporting Trump before he got re-elected. How are you feeling about how his second term is going? MAMET Well, I love him. He's great. I'm getting on 80. And I got so sick of my country dying. And so Trump — but it's not Trump. It's 53 percent of the American population who said, 'You know what? We're the middle class. We're tired of dying. We would like our country back.' So is this guy going to make a bunch of mistakes? Of course he is. Grant was a magnificent general who won the Civil War for the North. He gets into office and all the people who got underneath him were crooks. So it was the most crooked administration until Joe Biden. I'm glad the country's back. And so what we're doing is we're fighting each other, our fellow Americans, about what is the meaning of the Constitution. You're supposed to fight about the meaning of the Constitution. You're supposed to say, 'What's the law? Who gets to do what to whom?' Rather than fighting about are gay people better than trans people, are white people better than Black people. Fighting about political differences is what actually unites us. Because when everybody thinks the same way, you have a dictatorship, which is what we came pretty fucking close to. Shia, I'll leave the final thought to you. You've done some award-worthy work here, though we all know the challenges of that happening. But let's say it did. What would a nomination mean to you? LABEOUF I wouldn't need that. I'm just like a little kid on a magic carpet ride. Dave is my hero. So that's how you can end it. It's like wish-fulfillment and I don't deserve it. And it's super cool. Yeah. Wow. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Shia LaBeouf Has Shut Down Claims That He Shaded Timothée Chalamet In A Recent Interview By Sharing Their Bizarre 2023 Email Exchange
Earlier this week, Shia LaBeouf faced the wrath of Timothée Chalamet fans after he was accused of throwing shade at the actor during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. In the profile, Shia discussed how he was fired from the 2013 Broadway play Orphans after he clashed with his co-star Alec Baldwin. If you didn't know, Shia has always been a pretty big advocate for method acting, and slept in Central Park in preparation for this role. Discussing his drive for artistic excellence, the actor said: 'Man, I've been searching for a long time. I'm really, like, a pure actor. When I was young, I didn't think that I required much help to do what I do. I was completely narcissistic and fearful and had a lack of trust.' 'I've been under the tutelage of a lot of dudes who tried to mentor me, but I just didn't trust them, or didn't like what they made or whatever,' Shia concluded. Explaining that finding Catholicism has changed him in recent years, Shia insisted: 'Me and Alec would never have these problems now. But I was an island.' He then said: 'Then I hear Timothée Chalamet get up and he says something like: 'I want to be great.' I so know the feeling. On him, it's cute. On me, it wasn't cute. You know what I'm saying?' This was an obvious reference to Timothée's recent Screen Actors Guild Awards acceptance speech, where he told the crowd: 'I know we're in a subjective business, but I'm really in pursuit of greatness. People don't usually talk like this, but I want to be one of the greats. "I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there." Related: "All We Did Was Look In His Direction": People Are Opening Up About The Worst Celebs They've Ever Encountered, And I Did NOT Expect To See Some Of These Names Needless to say, some interpreted Shia's comment to be a swipe at Timmy. However, on Tuesday, Shia seemingly responded to this backlash by sharing a screenshot of an email exchange that he'd had with Timothée in October 2023 as he insisted to his X followers: 'we been good.' Related: From Florence Pugh To Zoë Kravitz, Here's All The Celebrities Who Rocked Sheer Or Naked Dresses If you're wondering, it was Timothée who instigated the online conversation after he seemingly saw Shia in the play Henry Johnson at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California. With the subject line 'Electric,' the Oscar-nominated actor could not hide his adoration for Shia as he wrote: 'Absolutely blown away by your work the other night. Totally electric, totally present at every turn, king of your kingdom even if that kingdom is a miserable 4x4 prison cell.' 'What a fantastic play. I hope you guys take it to New York,' he went on. 'And I hope this is the beginning of your work on stage and not an anomaly !! Timothée.' Shia replied to the email the following day, writing: 'Thank you doggy, Every blessing to you, Fun watching you evolve, Take ownership, Bang bang.' Captioning the screenshot in a tweet, Shia added: ''If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,' Timothée Chalamet is doing better work than anyone alive - we been good.' X @thecampaignbook / Via Shia is set to appear in court on Sept. 29, 2025 after his ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs accused him of assault, sexual battery, and infliction of emotional distress over the course of their relationship. Twigs first filed the lawsuit in 2020, but the court case has been pushed back twice. Shia denies all of the allegations against him. More on this FKA Twigs Discussed Her Abuse Allegations Against Shia LaBeoufEllen Durney · March 15, 2024 Timothée Chalamet Did Something Many Actors Are Afraid To Do In His Unconventional Acceptance Speech At The SAG Awards, And People Are Seriously ImpressedEllen Durney · Feb. 24, 2025 Here Is Everything You Need To Know About The Olivia Wilde And Florence Pugh Feud Rumors After Shia LaBeouf's Shocking ExposéStephanie Soteriou · Sept. 1, 2022 Olivia Wilde Said She 'Doesn't Feel The Need' To Deny Those Feud Rumors After Florence Pugh Skipped The 'Don't Worry Darling' Press ConferenceStephanie Soteriou · Sept. 5, 2022 Also in Celebrity: Can You Guess Who These Terrible Celebrity Wax Figures Are Supposed To Be? Also in Celebrity: 23 Celebrity Sex Secrets I Could've Gone My Entire Life Not Knowing, And Yet Here We Are Also in Celebrity: 28 Celeb Facts That Feel Like They're Made Up But Are Shockingly Real
