The Kid Gets the Picture

By Rebecca Winters Keegan

One week shy of his 21st birthday in June, Shia LaBeouf spent a morning learning to drive bizarre, top-secret vehicles alongside Harrison Ford. This fantasy gig started, as Hollywood fairy tales often do, with a summons to Steven Spielberg's office two months earlier. "Steven said, 'You ever seen Indiana Jones?'" the boyish-looking actor recounts, while chain smoking outside the Burbank, Calif., strip mall where he buys his daily Boston Market chicken and Robek's fruit smoothie ("The parking lot of dreams," LaBeouf calls his suburban stomping ground). "I said, 'Of course I've seen Indiana Jones.' He said, 'Well, we're making another one, and I'd like for you to be in it.' My heart went nuts. I've had anxiety attacks before, but I've never felt that--where you can't breathe and your stomach tenses." At some point LaBeouf did what you do when you're suddenly being offered Hollywood leading-man candidacy: he said yes.

As the human star of this summer's warring-alien-robot event film, Transformers; the voice of the lead penguin in the animated Surf's Up; the vulnerable bad boy in this spring's surprise hit, the Hitchcockian teen thriller Disturbia; and Spielberg's hand-picked choice to co-star with Ford and Cate Blanchett in the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie due next May, LaBeouf is blowing up faster than a stunt car on a Michael Bay set. In an age when potential action heroes seem to be either rugged '80s relics like Ford and Sylvester Stallone or sensitive thespians willing to double up on their bench presses like Tobey Maguire and Orlando Bloom, LaBeouf is that rarest of screen creatures, the scrappy kid next door. "Shia is within everyone's reach," says Spielberg. "He's every mother's son, every father's spitting image, every young kid's best pal and every girl's possible dream." With his giant brown eyes, lanky frame and indiscernible ethnicity (he's Jewish), he is a relatable foil for shiny robots and iconic heroes. "[DreamWorks] cast him in several bigger-than-life films," says Spielberg, "because we felt those films needed a realistic human anchor."

The authenticity that helps him ground those fantastic tales was earned through some harsh beginnings. LaBeouf grew up in Los Angeles' Echo Park, a mainly Latino working-class neighborhood, the only child of a drug-addicted Vietnam-vet father and a hippie-ballerina mother with a bum knee. "My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it," LaBeouf says. His first name, which rhymes with hi-ya, was the name of his maternal grandfather, a Catskills comic. His last name, pronounced La-Buff, is a name shared with his paternal grandmother, a Beatnik poet.

LaBeouf's father was a professional clown. When Shia was 2 years old, the family put together a street act to raise cash. "Latins are into clowns," says Shia. "We were the only white family around, so we figured we could do the look-at-us thing and dance around like a bunch of idiots." LaBeouf's father stole a maid's cart from a Best Western, decorated it with paint and streamers, stocked it with hot dogs and shaved ice and took his family to the park in clown costumes to perform. "I hated selling hot dogs. I hated dressing up in clown," LaBeouf says. "But the minute somebody would buy into my thing and buy a hot dog from my family because of my shtick, my parents would look at me like, 'All right, man.' Besides performing, I've never had that validation from anything else I've ever done in my life."

From an early age, LaBeouf was exposed to adult pastimes. With his dad he watched Steve McQueen movies and went to Rolling Stones concerts and AA meetings, where, at age 10, he learned to smoke and play cards. He met a kid whose surfboard he really liked. "He was on Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman," LaBeouf says. "He had all the stuff I wanted, materially. When you're in school, if you've got the new Filas on, no one's gonna punch you that day." The key to new Filas, LaBeouf figured, was to get paid to clown around.

He talked his way into a stand-up gig at a comedy club in Pasadena, Calif. "My thing was the 50-year-old mouth on the 10-year-old body," LaBeouf says. He took to the stage in overalls, with a bowl haircut, and "the first words out of my mouth would be 'Listen, assholes,'" he says. "Sometimes I would bomb. I'd talk about personal stuff and instead of laughing, people would look at me like, 'Oh, man, I'm so sorry.'" The potty-mouthed-preteen act only took him so far, so at age 11 LaBeouf found an agent. In the phone book. "I called up and did my 5-min. routine," he says. "Agents are used to the parents pimping. They're not used to the kid pimping. They liked the fact that I tried." LaBeouf's agent, who still works on his team, paid for head shots, drove him to auditions and paid his family's rent. At the time, LaBeouf's father was in a VA hospital going through withdrawal. "It pissed me off that he wasn't around," says LaBeouf. "We weren't strong enough to talk bluntly about what was really happening."

His comic timing and impish little-brother face quickly got LaBeouf TV work. By the time he was 14, he had acquired a cadre of kid fans and an Emmy as a lead on the Disney Channel show Even Stevens. At 16, LaBeouf moved into his own place in Burbank. Adult audiences first saw him on the reality show Project Greenlight. Accustomed to hanging out with creative, chaotic grownups, LaBeouf came off as a charmer, a good sport and one of the smarter people on set. The film Holes, which came out the same year, introduced LaBeouf to two of his stand-in father figures, co-star Jon Voight (who's also in Transformers) and Spielberg. Voight lent him acting books and turned him on to the notion that his work could be about more than a paycheck. Spielberg, meanwhile, saw Holes with his kids and filed the curly-haired teen away in his mind as a possible cinema son for Tom Hanks, should he need one. He didn't, but he would remember LaBeouf three years later, when it came time to cast two films he was producing, Disturbia and Transformers.

For the next few years, LaBeouf bounced from big studio projects like I, Robot and Constantine to indie resume builders like Bobby and A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. His parents divorced; he made room for his dad at his place. And he began to draw on his complicated relationship with his parents in his work. In the coming-of-age drama Guide, LaBeouf's character struggles to connect with his emotionally distant father, played by Chazz Palminteri. Before filming a confrontation scene between the characters, LaBeouf called his dad from the Queens, N.Y., set and asked him to sing a James Taylor song. "Oh, Mexico, never really been, but I'd sure like to go," LaBeouf sings. "Every time he sings it, I just go nuts. That was one of the songs he would sing all the time when he called me from the VA hospital, not remembering he had sung it before. He'd be like, 'Shia, I got a new song.' That was the worst time in my life as far as our family goes." LaBeouf drew on the memory again for scenes in Disturbia, in which he plays an aggrieved high schooler who attacks a teacher and ends up under house arrest. For all his Hanksian Everyguy appeal, LaBeouf's performances in these two films reveal flickers of Sean Penn--style pent-up fury. "A lot of actors in their 20s don't have that much range," says LaBeouf's Transformers co-star John Turturro. "The world is different now, less rugged in some ways. Everything is facile. But Shia has something else. He's been through a lot." Stardom in youth doesn't guarantee career longevity, though, says Turturro. In Transformers, LaBeouf plays a kid four years younger than his actual age. "Shia's playing juveniles right now," says Turturro. "He's just gotta make sure he develops, so when this period of time passes, he can do other things."

LaBeouf is aware of the paths he could take, professionally and personally. Yale School of Drama expressed interest in him, but he's stalling so he can do Indiana Jones 4. He describes his ideal career legacy as "Gary Oldman meets Hilary Duff," in that he wants to make quality films that people actually see. LaBeouf doesn't party--his father's drug problems were "my personal DARE program," he says. That doesn't mean he thinks his life is healthy. "This-- the stress, anxiety, fear--probably kills me just as fast as doing drugs. I don't know how you can get a grip on this." LaBeouf says it's hard to find people who share his challenges. "It's not like you can go to a therapist, 'Hey, remember the time you showed up and Harrison was doing the whip?' It's that weird feeling that, Oh, man, now you've gotta bring your A-game and there's no playbook. The emotional cost is high. Your life becomes secondary to your work." He doesn't date much. For fun he goes to see the Dodgers or plays video games with his friends. He describes himself as close to both parents today: his father, who is now sober, lives in a teepee in Montana; his mother, not far from him in Tujunga, Calif. "They're old hippies," he says. "They're not really worker bees. They're artists who just didn't have enough bureaucrat in them to get it all wrapped up in a nice little package to be able to feed to the American public."

The affable LaBeouf, it appears, has plenty of bureaucrat in him. "This is just a bigger hot dog that I'm selling," he says, of acting. "It's the same type of thing. You get dressed up. You do your clown. And if somebody buys a hot dog, then I get Steven Spielberg goin', 'O.K., kid' instead of my pop now." LaBeouf has a tattoo on his right wrist that reads 1986-2004. "My childhood," he explains. "I've been working since I was 10; 2004 is when I decided I became an adult. It was a personal decision." When it's pointed out to LaBeouf that the AA meetings and agent hounding of his youth might suggest he attained adulthood earlier, he shrugs. "But I'm living in a child's world now," LaBeouf says. "A dream world. I go to sleep at night, and I feel like I just dreamed the whole day."