Shia LaBeouf Is Not Famous Anymore

An actor returns to the red carpet

Shia LaBeouf at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

I saw Shia LaBeouf on TV today. Not long after that, I saw him on my phone. The people on TV didn’t talk about him. He was just there, at the Cannes Film Festival, standing right alongside his castmates and one of the few big-name directors still willing to give him a job. I thought he looked strange with his bleached hair slicked back, his face craggy, his weary expression giving way to short bursts of laughter as Jon Voight said one of those things that people on TV say to each other when they’re on camera but no one can hear them. He stood furthest to the left — I suppose that made him easy to crop out. It was certainly a safe distance from Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza, whose careers can survive appearing on the same cast list but maybe not being seen palling around with someone who has been accused of the things LaBeouf has been accused of.

He looked like someone whom I could be friends with. “A solid dude” who would probably do anything for you, the kind of person who would say things like “Me and Fred, we go way the fuck back. I’ve known that motherfucker all my life.” A guy ready to lay some platitudes on you when you’re going through a hard time and coming from him, they would actually mean something because you remember all the stuff he went through that he told you about. He’d probably prefer to keep things a little vague: “I hurt a lot of people in my life.”

The people in my phone did talk about him, though. The video posted online focused on LaBeouf’s return to the red carpet (“after 4 YEARS!”) and it got flooded by angry web-dwellers eager to remind the nameless, faceless content machine of just how horrifying the abuse described by FKA Twigs, his ex-girlfriend, was. (A lot of people seem to have forgotten that another ex-partner, Karolyn Pho, made similar claims). It’s hard to square the allegations with the fresh-faced kid from the Transformers films and it’s even harder to do with the boy in Holes, a film which came out more than two decades ago. (Curiously enough, Jon Voight was there for Holes and the first Transformers as well.) But look at him now — his gray-streaked beard voguishly unkempt, two self-inflicted scars on his cheekbone — and it feels like a short walk.

“It’s a miracle I came out alive,” is what Twigs said when talking to Elle in February 2021, two months after she sued LaBeouf for sexual battery, assault, and infliction of emotional distress. In between paragraphs of her recounting the horrific abuse she suffered at the hands of her former boyfriend, there are pictures of her posing in a variety of beautiful outfits. The image captions make sure to note the retail price of every item she’s wearing. The Cartier hoop earrings dangling from her earlobes in the second picture cost more than I have ever made in a month.

At one point Twigs relates a story of a trip to Jamaica — the piece notes her “strong ancestral ties” to the island — and the author uses this as an opportunity to contextualize LaBeouf’s abuse as not just the violent deeds of a psychologically disturbed individual but as part of a long history of patriarchal and colonial violence inflicted on Black women by men, white men in particular:

That twigs’s white boyfriend was policing her movements in her ancestral homeland, one already burdened with a complicated colonial history, was all the more disturbing, especially given that Black women are statistically more vulnerable to [intimate partner violence].

LaBeouf’s sins extended beyond the realm of abuse. There is talk of him having long tried to “forge a connection with Black culture” and “[having made] a point to associate himself with young Black artists,” two bits of characterization that are heavy with the weight of accusation. In the very next sentence, Twigs mentions waking up to him strangling her. Later on, her description of LaBeouf bragging about shooting stray dogs — he supposedly claimed it helped him get into character for a role in the 2020 thriller The Tax Collector — immediately segues into her lamenting that he belittled her acting talent and musical career.

These juxtapositions really stood out to me when I first read about these allegations three years ago. Animal abuse side by side with disparagement. Strangulation side by side with pettiness. Pathological lying side by side with temper tantrums. There was such a palpable darkness to this person, this man, Twigs was describing. But he was more than a man: he was every alcoholic boyfriend with an anger problem. He was every self-serious, self-destructive, self-important male artist who cares more about bleeding (literally) for his craft than getting his shit together for the people who love him. The white hipster who fancies himself a brown bagger and, even more hypocritically, an “ally.” The usually so pitiful former child star turned perpetrator, abuser, monster.

After the allegations were first publicized, LaBeouf sent out a diplomatic, vaguely apologetic but still somewhat self-victimizing email — “I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years” — and retreated from the public sphere. Compelled by what was either misplaced worry or simple morbid curiosity, I made a habit of regularly checking the internet to see if he had reemerged somewhere. Finally, after a few months of hearing and seeing nothing, I came across pictures of him trekking through LAX dressed as a friar. It was eventually revealed that he had landed a role in an Abel Ferrara film about Padre Pio, playing the titular (and suitably cantankerous) priest. Anyone keeping up with his life since then knows that this role eventually led to LaBeouf, who was born to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, embracing the Catholic faith. He has recently even expressed interest in becoming a deacon.

A few days ago, a friend of mine said something to the effect of “Funny how these shitty men always find God right after they fuck up.” I wondered who else Catholicism is even for. A lot of the Catholic saints were fuck ups before finding God and, depending on who you ask, some of them remained fuck ups after that too. In Ferrara’s The Funeral, one of the characters ask another if they are Christian. They answer no. “That’s because you haven’t suffered enough.” LaBeouf’s suffering led him to one of the many churches calling itself the one true church — how much abuse would it have taken for Twigs to publicly declare herself a Catholic?

I had trouble sleeping for a few days after the allegations came out, shaken by the relentless abuse I read about and, if you’ll allow me this moment of vulnerability, the terrible memories it conjured. Only a year later, I was talking about Twigs’ then-new mixtape Caprisongs with my cousin and she said she thought the singer looked “kind of annoying,” wondering, in jest, if that’s what caused LaBeouf to abuse her — a rare moment of dark-humored weakness from my otherwise very virtuous cousin. We laughed in disbelief at her surprising transgression. When LaBeouf’s two-hour interview with Jon Bernthal was released later that year, I found myself listening to it over and over, holding back tears as he spoke candidly about his life following the allegations, the shame he felt, and how love and hope slowly trickled back in amidst the darkness he had navigated himself into.

I sometimes wonder if I identify more with him than I do with her and if so, why that is. When I think about the allegations and the hell Twigs (or any of the countless people he hurt) must have suffered through, I hate him. When I listen to his interview with Bernthal, I see myself in him. When I look at pictures of him at a film festival, I’m happy for him. And then I remember the allegations again and wonder how Twigs or Pho (or, again, any of the other people affected by his behavior) must feel about his return to the red carpet. Has one of them said anything about it? Has anyone asked?

One of the first things LaBeouf said on Bernthal’s podcast was that he wanted to “give dudes who fuck up hope.” I never fucked up the way he has but he gave me hope nonetheless, hope that no matter how bleak things get, they can always get better. As soon as I put some distance between myself and that interview, however, I wonder how much of it was an act. How “real” can anything be that happens in front of a camera, that is said into a microphone? (The name of the podcast is Real Ones, incidentally.) Then I watch the interview again and doubt that he’s a good enough actor to pull off a performance like that.

For some reason, the words “forgiveness,” “grace,” and “love” have been rattling around my brain constantly these past few years and I must admit that they didn’t really mean much to me for the majority of my life. Frankly, I’m still not sure what they mean. But when I think about those words these days, I remember the story my mom, a nurse, told me about a man who came to live at the retirement home she used to work at. The man was an unabashed racist who tried taunting my Jamaican mother — yes, I share an “ancestral homeland” with Twigs — with slurs and Nazi slogans. She swiftly set him straight and he never made a peep around her again, not a racist one anyway. When it came time for him to meet whichever deity bears responsibility for creating old bigots, the man, having no living family, wanted my mother to be by his side. It was my mother who sat next to him, holding his hand as he took his final breaths, gently reassuring him that everything was going to be okay when she saw the fear in his eyes.

There’s an ill-defined “we” that is often referred to when talking about whether or not a famous person who gets outed as an abuser of some sort should be allowed to be famous again. Ultimately, that’s what these conversations come down to. It isn’t up to “us” to forgive anyone — what we really want to know is whether or not we should have complicated feelings when seeing someone’s picture, hearing their music, watching a film they’re in.

The brown paper bag LaBeouf infamously wore over his head to the Nymphomaniac premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 had the words “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” scrawled across it. It wasn’t true then but little did he know that it would turn out to be prophetic. We love hearing about what famous people are up to. We’re excited to see them in new things. We get a kick out of seeing them with other famous people. We’re jealous of famous people’s partners. Famous people are talked about on TV. No, Shia LaBeouf isn’t famous anymore but I don’t know what exactly he is or what he will be. He will likely keep getting roles even though these allegations will cast a shadow over his work for the rest of his life. I don’t think that’s justice but then I don’t really know what that word means either.

It was December 2020 when Twigs filed her lawsuit. It is almost June 2024 and no one has seen the inside of a courthouse yet, let alone a prison cell. The trial was pushed back more than once, with both sides citing their busy schedules and, in once instance, the birth of LaBeouf and Mia Goth’s child. It is currently set to proceed on October 14 of this year. LaBeouf gave a rather low-key interview three months ago and at one point talked about how much he “hated” a certain boxer for divorcing his wife the day after she gave birth. He quickly corrected himself: “I don’t hate him, I don’t hate nobody but I don’t respect him.” The interviewer had a bad habit of constantly interrupting him and I saw something like anger flash across LaBeouf’s face every time.

---