Shia LaBeouf supposedly took refuge in New York City’s Central Park amid his storied feud with Alec Baldwin during rehearsals for the 2013 Broadway production of Orphans.
The 38-year-old Transformer star claimed he would sometimes sleep in the two-mile-long park the night before his Orphans rehearsals with Baldwin, before he wound up leaving the production due to “creative differences” between them.
“When [Baldwin] came in, I’m living in the park and I’m on steroids and I’m not in a good way,” LaBeouf told The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview published May 8. “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,” he remembered of the park.
LaBeouf said he slept in the park for the majority of the time he was in rehearsal for the production.
During this time, Baldwin was cast to replace legendary actor Al Pacino, who backed out of the production. And this took a hit on LaBeouf, he told the outlet.
“By the time Baldwin got there, it was almost unfair,” he said. “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.”
The Holes lead went on to say this circumstance took a toll on their relationship, leading to lots of contention and unwanted competition.
“That’s just what our relationship turned into,” LaBeouf continued. “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.”
All the tension led to LaBeouf’s firing from the production in 2013. At the time, LaBeouf told Interview magazine he was devastated. He also confessed to following Baldwin home from rehearsals after he was no longer in the production.
“I was following him home. I was completely broken, and still in [character]. I didn’t know what to do. I started boxing,” he told Interview in 2014. “I was trying to take my mind off the play, but I couldn’t do it. So I would follow him from rehearsal to his home. I needed to have closure.”
However, the actor has now said there’s no more bad blood between him and Baldwin, who faced involuntary manslaughter charges not too long ago for a gun incident on a different set that led to one woman’s death.
“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,” LaBeouf said of Baldwin. “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.”
Last year, Baldwin was on trial in connection to the fatal death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and faced the possibility of 18 months behind bars.
Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter after he was handling a prop gun that went off during a rehearsal of a film’s shooting scene in 2021, striking and killing Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.
The trial lasted only a week before Baldwin’s case was thrown out.
The actor broke down in tears and hugged his attorneys and his wife Hilaria after Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer announced her decision in the New Mexico courtroom.
