Shia LaBeouf has said his recent bout of self-mutilation stems from a lack of confidence in his own acting abilities. Speaking on Sunday at the European premiere of second world war drama Fury, which closed the London film festival, the actor addressed recent reports that he cut his face with a knife and had a tooth removed in order to play a war-ravaged soldier in David Ayer’s film.
“I’m not a really confident actor. I don’t have faith in my abilities,” the one-time Transformers star said. “It’s like if I told you to react to a gunshot right now. It would be much easier if I just got a gun out and pulled the trigger, because you wouldn’t have to conjure anything. You would just react to it. I try to alter my life so that I don’t have to conjure anything or to make believe.”
LaBeouf also revealed that producers instituted a gruelling boot camp for cast members Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal and Scott Eastwood. “It was more than a physical thing – it was psychological,” he said. “They built situations that were doomed to fail so you couldn’t win. You get to 100 push-ups and they’d say 100 more, then when you do that it would be 100 more.
“You have to rely on each other because if I can’t do it, Jon’s got to do them. And if he can’t, Mike’s got to do them, and so forth. You learn to relinquish yourself as the ‘we’ of it rather than the ‘I’. It takes the selfishness away.”
The actor’s extreme method-acting tactics were revealed by co-star Lerman in an interview with GQ. Earlier this year, the star wore a paper bag to the premiere of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. In January, he responded to charges of plagiarism by hiring a skywriter, and in September he was arrested at a theatre in New York and charged with disorderly conduct.
On Sunday, LaBeouf called Fury a new kind of war movie: “It’s really about intimacy among men.” The film opens in UK cinemas on 22 October. It debuted at No 1 in the US at the weekend with a haul of $23.5m (£14.5m).
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