The Shia LaBeouf comeback has begun—starting with a project about, who else, Shia LaBeouf. Honey Boy is a biopic of sorts that details the relationship between LaBeouf and his father during LaBeouf’s Even Stevens years on the Disney Channel. LaBeouf co-wrote the film’s script and hosted it on the Black List, a website tracking the most popular unproduced scripts in the industry that’s become a resource for directors searching for their next projects.
LaBeouf revealed that he’d written the script under the pseudonym Otis Lort in Esquire’s profile of him published this week; the publication noted that the fake name roughly translates to “Wealthy Turd.” The profile also found LaBeouf, whose struggles and escapades have been making headlines practically since he broke into mainstream stardom by headlining the first Transformers movie, speaking candidly about numerous topics, including the state of his career: “I’m run out,” he said. “No one’s giving me a shot right now. Spike Lee is making a movie. I was talking to him about it. He goes to the money and pushes to try to get me in the movie, the money says no, and that’s the end of me hanging out with Spike Lee for this film.” LaBeouf also expressed regret for previously denigrating his collaborations with Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, right before slamming their big-budget movies once more: “My hang-up with those films was that they felt irrelevant. They felt dated as fuck… You come up on these stories about Easy Rider and Raging Bull and De Niro and Scorsese and Hopper, and you find value in what they do. Meanwhile, you’re chasing energon crystals.”
According to its official description, Honey Boy is a film in which “a child actor and his law-breaking, alcohol-abusing father”—based on LaBeouf’s own father, Jeffrey—“attempt to mend their contentious relationship over the course of a decade.”
Manchester by the Sea and Lady Bird star Lucas Hedges will be playing LaBeouf in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter—or, rather, a version of LaBeouf, as Honey Boy takes the real events of LaBeouf’s young life and fictionalizes them, giving the characters different names. LaBeouf spent most of his youth pinballing back and forth between the set of the Disney show that gave him his big break and the various 12 step programs of his father, a former professional clown and recovering heroin addict. “Honey Boy” was the nickname LaBeouf’s father called his son. The film will be directed by Alma Har’el, who also directed LaBeouf in Sigur Rós’ 2012 short video “Fjögur píanó.”
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