Shia LaBeouf Reveals He Was Sleeping in Central Park Amid Tensions With Alec Baldwin in Broadway Play
Shia LaBeouf is getting candid about his struggles.
The 38-year-old actor revealed in a new interview that at one point in his life, while he was working on a Broadway play, he was “sleeping in Central Park.”
Shia spoke with The Hollywood Reporter alongside his Henry Johnson director David Mamet, and reflected on a point in his life when he was “not in a good way” while working on the play Orphans, which he eventually dropped out of.
Shia also recalled the tensions between himself and Alec Baldwin on Orphans ahead of him dropping out of the project, but said that they eventually “made it right.”
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“By the time Baldwin got there, it was almost unfair. So he’s dealing with both my fractured little weak ego, right? All this hard prep that I’d done for two years, and my desperate need to show him all my prep, or that he would accept me somehow. I was so insecure. Well, that got contentious in the room. Then he got competitive. That’s just what our relationship turned into,” he explained.
“I’d be off book, he’d be on book, and he didn’t want me to look at him be off book. That makes it hard to play these scenes out or block this thing even. And no fault against him, he had two weeks to come in because Pacino [dropped out]. I had built the whole thing based on my relationship with Pacino. And that’s gone. So I was kind of heartbroken. When he came in, I’m living in the park and I’m on steroids and I’m not in a good way,” he went on to say.
“Yeah. I was sleeping in Central Park. They keep horses there at this little fire basin. And there’s a whole lot of room around there where you can just chill. You got to move every three or four hours and the guy comes around, but you can spend most of your time there,” Shia continued.
He went on to explain what happened.
“Alec started teaching at NYU — a class on acting while I was doing these rehearsals with him. And I was like, ‘How? You’re still not off book!’ So then I started taking his class. It got insane. But me and him are good because he’s gone through a lot. I’ve gone through a lot. We’ve both been able to send each other love and make it right before all the madness happened on both sides. We made it right. He’s a good guy. He’s just like me. Fear will make you move different. I found it came from having absolutely no spiritual life,” he said.
Not having a spiritual life “made me a piece of s–t” and “not a nice guy,” he said, adding that finding Catholicism and having lived in a monastery “changes the way you work, for sure.”
“Me and Alec would never have these problems now. But I was in an island,” he continued.
“Then I hear Timothée Chalamet get up [at the 2025 SAG Awards] and he says something like, ‘I want to be great.’ I so know the feeling. On him, it’s cute. On me, it wasn’t cute,” he added.
Shia LaBeouf is also standing by a documentary that depicts him allegedly initiating physical altercations against some of his acting students.