When Shia LaBeouf came before the huge crowd at London's Empire cinema to present Michael Bay's blockbuster , he was chewing gum and looked like any teenage kid. Yet the talented actor, who is actually 21, is rapidly turning into the biggest star of his generation. If his performance in Bay's film doesn't shoot his star into the stratosphere, then his current turn alongside Harrison Ford in the fourth Indiana Jones movie surely will.
There is, of course, a link between the two films. Steven Spielberg, a big kid and fan, financed Bay's $US145 million ($170 million) film via his Dreamworks company and he is directing another Indiana Jones sequel. "Steven kept looking at the dailies," Bay says, "and he kept saying Shia is like a young Tom Hanks.
When he was young, Tom was that funny, everyday guy as well." Reading how he was once billed as "the 10-year-old kid with the 50-year-old mouth" still didn't prepare me for meeting the garrulous actor, who credits growing up in the rough Los Angeles neighbourhood of Echo Park with keeping him grounded. "I was the only white kid at my school and I used to get in a lot of fights.
So my safe haven was, 'Well, I'll tell you a cool story, don't punch me.' It worked." Does that help in the business now?
"I'm just different, you know. A lot of the male actors you have in movies grew up in the Oakwood apartments in New York and never saw those things. It's like the actor [ghetto]," he laughs.
LaBeouf brings a lot of himself to the role of Sam Witwicky, a teenager who buys a hot rod only to discover it is a transforming alien. Bumblebee is one of the good Transformers (Autobots) and needs something from Sam to save the planet before the bad Transformers (Decepticons) destroy it. LaBeouf is getting used to Spielberg's structured approach ("Steven storyboards everything").
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