Shia Labeouf and Miles Teller: back to their roots

In Damien Chazelle’s new musical La La Land, which just earned rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling sing, dance, and fall in love. It’s the actors’ third film together, after Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad, but when Chazelle first got the project off the ground, neither actor was involved: Instead, he’d cast his Whiplash star Miles Teller opposite Harry Potter actress Emma Watson. That Gosling and Stone came to lead the film feels preordained, but it’s another example of the tenuous art of casting: Many movies almost get made with totally different actors starring, while sometimes the performers who nearly missed the cut for a big role present an intriguing notion of what might have been.

Warren Beatty works at his own deliberate pace, so when he first put together his Howard Hughes comedy Rules Don’t Apply, in 2011, Felicity Jones was cast as the female lead and Beatty met with actors like Shia LaBeouf and Andrew Garfield to play her paramour. After production delays and a studio shuffle, though, Beatty finally shot the film in 2014 with Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich (your new Han Solo) as the leads. Source: www.vulture.com

“American Honey” director Andrea Arnold, who generally works with unknown actors, brushed off warnings not to cast LaBeouf in her low-budget film. Drawn to his earlier performance in “Transformers,” she met the actor for the first time several years ago in a café near her home outside London. The next time she saw him was in New York, on the morning after his “Cabaret” arrest, coming from jail and carrying his shoelaces in his hands. “I can never forget his face,” Arnold says. “He was hurting. He was very quiet.”  Arnold never gave LaBeouf a script, just a black and white picture of a forest for inspiration.

“American Honey” offers another milestone for the actor. It’s a performance that started generating Oscar buzz out of Cannes. But he scoffs at the awards chatter. “Nah, dude, not me,” says LaBeouf, who still hasn’t been invited into the Academy, despite having appeared in 30 movies. “The Oscars are about politics. It’s not about who is the best.” The career trajectory he was on as an A-list leading man doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, he has joined a generation of actors —Jake Gyllenhaal, Kristen Stewart— who have bypassed studio movies for indies. LaBeouf admits that he’s no longer on Hollywood’s wish list for major blockbusters. David Ayer approached him for “Suicide Squad,” for a role that eventually went to Scott Eastwood. LaBeouf says the studio vetoed his casting. “I don’t think Warner Bros. wanted me. I went in to meet and they were like, ‘Nah, you’re crazy.’ It was a big investment for them.”

Labeouf thought Spielberg would be his ticket to a big-screen legacy. “You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” LaBeouf says. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career. He’s less a director than he is a f–king company.” (Spielberg declined to comment). LaBeouf felt like there was no room to grow as an actor, and that he was stuck. “Spielberg’s sets are very different,” he says. “Everything has been so meticulously planned. You do that for five years, you start to feel like not knowing what you’re doing for a living.”

It was around this time that he started drinking heavily. “Part of it was posturing,” LaBeouf says. “I never knew how to drink. I never liked to drink. It was a weird post-modern fascination with the f–k-ups.” LaBeouf says that his latest adventure gave him the chance to feel what he’s been chasing—human connection. “You float with people,” he says. “You’ve got to stay malleable.” Source: variety.com

Here’s a brief synopsis of a dye job gone horribly wrong. The person of interest: Miles Teller. The time of incident: Spotted at the ESPYs in July. The embarrassing crime: Botching a blonde dye job. The public reaction: Sheer mockery. Thankfully, Teller’s unfortunate dye job from earlier this summer is now officially a thing of the past. The hair hue change was done in part to help transform Teller into a role for Joseph Kosinski’s movie about the Granite Mountain Hotshots. The film covers the story of 20 firefighters who fought the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013 and Teller plays the sole survivor who has — you guessed it — blonde hair, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Now with filming wrapped up, though, Miles Teller has gone back to his roots (his brunette hair). He recognizes, too, the wrong he did in switching up his hair and has offered an apology to the public: “Dear Internet, I’m sorry I dyed my hair blonde,” he wrote on Twitter. “I never meant to hurt you. Please accept this apology.” All is forgiven, Teller. Source: nymag.com