Shia LaBeouf has opened up about his major falling out with longtime acting mentor Jon Voight — and how the two eventually reconciled.
LaBeouf, 39, and Voight, 86, first worked together on the former’s breakout film Holes. They later reunited in 2007’s Transformers and most recently for Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 multi-million dollar passion project Megalopolis.
But long before Coppola brought them back together on the same set, the two found themselves heavily divided over politics. LaBeouf was outspoken in his criticism of Donald Trump, while Voight became one of the president’s most vocal Hollywood supporters.
“We had a big fight on the phone where I told him I was going to come to his house and we were going to fist fight, and I hung up the phone,” LaBeouf recalled in the new documentary, Megadoc, about the creation of Megalopolis, per Entertainment Weekly. “Didn’t talk to him for years.”
However, before the two could board Coppola’s movie as Clodio (LaBeouf) and Hamilton (Voight), they had to make amends.
“The first version [of the script] I read was about five years ago. [Coppola] did a table read. And in the time from that read to this film, I had basically f***ed my whole life up,” LaBeouf said, likely referring to his recently-settled lawsuit with ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs, in which she accused him of abuse.
“I was in the midst of doing my ninth step in this program I’m in, and I had to go make amends to Voight because Voight’s politics and mine are very different. I love him very much,” the Honey Boy screenwriter added.
“He was like my mentor from a young age,” LaBeouf continued of the Midnight Cowboy star. “He was like the first real actor I ever met, and he’s the first one who put me on to [Dustin] Hoffman’s repertoire.”
LaBeouf additionally recounted years ago when Voight “would sit in a room with me and watch all these movies back to back, and [that] made me fall in love with the process and the craft, because before that, I was just a poor kid making money.”
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Released in 2024, Megalopolis is a futuristic fable that draws parallels between modern-day America and the fall of Rome. In addition to LaBeouf and Voight, it starred Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Game of Thrones alum Nathalie Emmanuel, and Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman.
Explaining his casting choices, particularly Voight, Coppola previously told Rolling Stone: “What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers. The cast features people who were canceled at one point or another.
“There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive. But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”
Following Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, LaBeouf launched a four-year anti-Trump art project, titled “He Will Not Divide Us.”
The artwork was displayed in cities across the nation, “as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community,” according to the project’s website.
Voight later accused LaBeouf and other Trump critics of “teaching treason.”
“They’re teaching going up against the government, not accepting the will of the people on this presidency. And it’s a very sad day when I see this,” the Anaconda actor and father of Angelina Jolie said to TMZ. “I don’t know what the people, this Hollywood group, I find it, it’s a very sad thing for me to witness. But they have a lot of influence, a huge amount of influence. So anyway, it’s not so good.”
