When Method Acting Goes Wrong: Shia LaBeouf Cut His Face And Removed A Tooth

Thanks to this new interview with Logan Lerman describing the lengths Shia LaBeouf went to for Fury, Brad Pitt’s “best actor I’ve seen” comments make a lot more sense. I don’t know if Pitt meant “best actor I’ve seen” so much as “Oh, Shia LaBeouf? Yeah, that motherf*cker’s crazy.” According to Lerman, Shia cut his own face and had a tooth removed for Fury. You know, standard actor stuff.

Logan Lerman told the British edition of GQ that LaBeouf repeatedly cut his own face with a knife to make his war wounds look fully authentic.

“We were in make-up and they were putting cuts on Shia and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it looks good.’ And Shia was like, ‘No, it doesn’t look real’,” he said.

“Based on my years of experience with real-life warfare, I cannot support the legitimacy of these flesh wounds.”

“Then he walks out into the hallway and says, ‘Hey man, wanna see something fun? Check this out…’ and he takes out a knife and cuts his face. And for the whole movie he kept opening these cuts on his face. That’s all real.”

That’s wise. I mean, he’s an actor, so it’s not like he needs his face for anything.

In addition to the facial cuts, the 28-year-old LaBeouf had his dentist remove one of his front teeth for the role of World War II tank crew-member Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan. The actor snapped a toothless pic of himself, and later posted it to fans on his Twitter page. [Yahoo]

When I interviewed Derek Cianfrance about Place Beyond The Pines, he told a story about Ben Mendolsohn offering to have a tooth removed for that movie, and then getting all the way to the x-ray stage of the process before a level-headed producer talked them out of it. Actors, man. So dramatic. Theater majors gonna theater, as we like to say. Acting is definitely the only profession where elective dentistry makes you hardcore.