Shia LaBeouf Will Play His Own Dad in a Biopic About Himself
Shia LaBeouf’s been slowly returning to the Hollywood spotlight after a few brief stints in performance art, and while most of his recent roles have been pretty small ones, he’s gearing up for another star vehicle in which he will play his own father in a movie about himself. Sort of. Kind of. I’ll explain.
LaBeouf revealed in his lengthy Esquire profile that he had co-written a script that was hosted by the Black List, the website that tracks the hottest unproduced scripts for directors to trawl when they’re searching for their next project. That script is titled Honey Boy, written under the pseudonym Otis Lort. It goes back in time to when LaBeouf was getting his big break as a young actor on Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, and being shuttled back and forth between the set and his former heroin addict father’s various 12-step programs. “Honey Boy” is his father’s nickname for him.
Variety reports that Lucas Hedges, star of last year’s Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, will play young LaBeouf, or, rather, a LaBeouf-like character, as Honey Boy was written in the “roman a clef style” — that is, it’s a true story, but people’s names are changed so it’s kind of like fiction. LaBeouf will play his own father in the film. The plot according to the Black List reads: “A child actor and his law-breaking, alcohol-abusing father attempt to mend their contentious relationship over the course of a decade.”
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