Shia LaBeouf has had a tumultuous time of it lately, but Ellen DeGeneres didn’t know a thing about it. During an appearance on Friday’s episode of “Ellen” where he stopped by to discuss his upcoming movie “Fury,” she told him that she did a little research on him and was surprised by all that she uncovered.
“I went through like an existential crisis, which turned into kind of like some exploration really,” LaBeouf said. “I had some hiccups, you know. Some judgment errors.”
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She talked about the time he wore a paper bag on his head with the words “I am not famous anymore” written on it, and the follow-up “performance art” bit he did on the street. In that, he put himself in a box and invited people in one by one to interact with him.
“There was a lot of negativity online, so I thought alright, let’s see what this negativity’s about. And let’s invite it in,” he said. “I was sitting in there broken. I was really and truly apologetic.”
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LaBeouf expected people to come in and be mean, as he had seen with the online reaction, but he said the actual experience was quite different.
“Once they got in there, everything changed,” he said. “They stopped looking at me as like an object and they started looking at me as like a human. And they were very loving; it was really human.”
He said that he thinks the people who write nasty comments and posts online are actually coming from the same place he is and many other performers are. “I think we suffer from the same thing, which is a lack of attention and love,” he said.
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LaBeouf said that he’s in a much better place now, and that it was his last stint in jail that finally brought him to his senses. In that instance, he’d spit on a cop — he turned to the camera to sincerely apologize to this office while telling the story — which culminated in him being strapped down with a facial mask on like what Hannibal Lecter wore.
LaBeouf co-stars with
“The Ellen Degeneres Show” airs in syndication nationwide.