Actor Shia LaBeouf Tweets that he will retire from acting and #stopcreating after accusations of plagiarism.
Always a tumultuous force on and offset, actor Shia LaBeouf has apparently had enough of the media feeding frenzy he often finds his career in, especially following the plagiarism charges of his “HowardContour.com”short film.
Taking to his Twitter account where he has experienced scores of disdainful Tweets from followers, and even other celebrities like Patton Oswalt, LaBeouf announced Friday morning that we won’t have Shia to kick around anymore.
“In light of the recent attacks against my artistic integrity, I am retiring from all public life,” LaBeouf wrote. He further elaborated, “My love goes out to those who have supported me. #stopcreating.”
LaBeouf has always been a news-making presence as a child star turned blockbuster darling of Steven Spielberg to, most recently, a cantankerous method actor working the indie circuit. Indeed, besides having the upcoming two-volume Lars von Trier Nymphomaniac films for 2014, for which unproven rumors suggest that he and other actors participated in real on-camera sex, he supposedly dropped LSD for a drug induced scene in 2013’s Charlie Countryman. The irony is that this sort of public hand-wringing overshadows other facets to his character, such as the example that he was very impressive in Charlie Countryman. However, much as he has a tendency to burn bridges, like with Spielberg and Harrison Ford when he publicly badmouthedIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or expressed glaring apathy for the Michael Bay directed and Spielberg produced Transformerssequel in a series that made him a star, LaBeouf has struggled to maintain a friendly relationship with the press.
This blew up last month when his Cannes Film Festival screened “HowardContour.com” short film was released online to an immediate negative reaction. Despite claiming that he wrote and directed the short, it became quickly contended by critics that Shia had adapted Justin M. Damiano, a comic book created by Ghost World’s Daniel Clowes, without the author’s consent. The response has been…intense.
Is this the latest episode in LaBeouf’s new career in public misfires—an effect which often ends with the slinging mud landing back on the actor’s face—or a sincere retirement from acting? Considering that he still is appearing in the Brad Pitt and David Ayers 2014 World War II picture, we know that this will not be the last we hear of the actor. And hopefully, he can simply learn to continue creating without shaking the Twitterverse or movie scene with extreme exclamations and chest-thumping missteps.