Image via Complex Original
Shia LaBeouf is one of the more astonishing pop culture figures going right now. Not only does he have the rare gift of being an ex-child star who can actually act as an adult, but he does things like get thrown out of a performance of Cabaret for being drunk and groping actor Alan Cumming.
Say what you will about him, but there’s no doubt that Shia is never boring.
He sat down for an interview and kind of absurd photo shoot with Interview Magazine, and had some truly astonishing things to say that did at least help shed some light on his crazy, crazy life. Here are the six craziest quotes from his conversation:
Who does this at bathtime?
“I remember when I was 3, taking baths with my mom, her petting my head and going, ‘One day you're going to meet Steven Spielberg.’ And then it happened.”
Riding shotgun on the Mel Gibson bandwagon.
“INTERVIEWER: Sean Penn has never become the lighter, laughing guy.
SHIA: No. Or Mel Gibson. And I still love both those motherfuckers so much. They're still my favorite dudes.”
Manipulating his dad.
“I'd love to be closer to my dad. But we've got something going on between us that's really valuable to me right now—more valuable to me than having a father. And I financially support his whole lifestyle. I pay him to be my marionette puppeteer.”
An existential crisis.
“I've been going through an existential crisis. If you look at my behavior, it's been motivated by a certain discourse. Metamodernism has influenced a lot of my action in the public in this last year and a half—the idea of diametrically opposed ideas happening all at once: the irony and the sincerity, birth and death, the immediacy and the obsolescence.”
Shia does not like the Internet very much.
“No one man or woman can be 50 people to another person. And what we're doing to fulfill that is we're creating a family of ghosts on the internet. You're better off buying a fucking motorcycle and joining the Hells Angels than joining Twitter and finding your community there, but this is what we do.”
Learning from mistakes is hard.
“I'm not a very intelligent person, and you've got to be a fucking genius to learn from other people's mistakes, because you've got to be a very smart man to learn from your own.”
On-set rumbles after taking drugs.
"Right after that acid trip, I was choking [Fredrik Bond, director of Charlie Countryman]—my trainer had to pull me off him. He almost walked off that movie. He wanted to break for lunch while I was tripping on drugs. I was like, 'We can't break for lunch, I'm on fucking drugs.' And that turned into madness."
