Shia LaBeouf has attacked celebrity culture for enslaving him, in an interview with Variety.
The 28-year-old actor has been promoting a new film called LoveTrue, which he has executive produced, at the Tribeca film festival. In an email exchange to promote the fiction/documentary hybrid, he spoke about how being in the public eye makes him uncomfortable.
“As a celebrity/star I am not an individual – I am a spectacular representation of a living human being, the opposite of an individual,” he wrote. “The enemy of the individual, in myself as well as in others. The celebrity/star is the object of identification, with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that are actually lived.”
LaBeouf, who claimed that he was retiring from all public life at the start of last year, has since been in the second world war thriller Fury and the controversial Sia music video for Elastic Heart. He now refers to himself as a performer who is more interested in performance art.
“The craft of acting for film is terribly exclusive and comes with the baggage of celebrity, which robs you of your individuality and separates you,” he wrote. “The performance work is democratised and far more inclusive.”
He went onto describe himself and other stars as slaves, and the entire concept of celebrity as old-fashioned.
“The requirements to being a star/celebrity are namely, you must become an enslaved body,” he wrote. “Just flesh – a commodity, and renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The star is a byproduct of the machine age, a relic of modernist ideals. It’s outmoded.”
LaBeouf can next be seen in post-apocalyptic thriller Man Down with Kate Mara and Gary Oldman, and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey.
