Shia LaBeouf isn’t one to hold back what he thinks. He also isn’t one to give a damn.
The actor, who stars in the upcoming “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” opens up in the August issue of Details about his tough upbringing, hooking up with his taken leading ladies and being, as the magazine puts it, Hollywood’s last bad boy.
During his time working on 2007′s “Transformers,” the 25-year-old actor reveals he had a fling with former co-star Megan Fox.
“Look, you’re on the set for six months, with someone who’s rooting to be attracted to you, and you’re rooting to be attracted to them,” he explains. “I never understood the separation of work and life in that situation. But the time I spent with Megan was our own thing, and I think you can see the chemistry onscreen.”
As for Fox’s status at the time with her longtime boyfriend, Brian Austin Green (whom she wed last June), LaBeouf cryptically replies, “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know … ,” repeating the phrase 12 times in 12 different ways before finally saying, “It was what it was.”
While working on the franchise’s next installment, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” in 2009, LaBeouf admits to “philandering around” with co-star Isabel Lucas, who was in a relationship with actor Adrien Grenier at the time.
“It was sort of disastrous,” LaBeouf says. “Neither one of us, I think, were in love. Just sort of experimenting or whatever.”
Albeit with a few high-profile hookups (he says his one date with Hillary Duff was “probably the worst date either of us have ever had”), LeBeouf calls himself a “serial monogamist.”
He still speaks highly of his “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” co-star Carey Mulligan, whom he dated for more than a year before amicably splitting last October.
“I still love her,” he says. “I think she’s a f—ing awesome person and an incredible actress. We’re still pals. I wouldn’t take any of it back, and I don’t think she would either. It just ran its course.”
The actor is currently in a relationship with Karolyn Pho, a student and stylist who he first saw at a restaurant and blatantly hit on. Together for seven months now, the couple lives a simple life with LaBeouf’s one-eyed English bulldog, Brando.
“It’s a pretty mundane, domestic, docile, lame, sort of not-that-exciting existence,” he says.
But while his life now seems calmer, LaBeouf didn’t always have it easy. He grew up in Los Angeles with a shaved ice-selling mom who paid rent by dressing up as a clown and a heroin-addicted dad who spent most of his time in a VA hospital trying to kick his drug habit.
“I f—ing hated him for it – choosing the hospital over me,” the actor says of his father. “I felt like shit about myself. I was basically alone. That does something to you.”
As one therapist suggested, LaBeouf took his anger out on a stuffed animal every day after school. But that wasn’t enough since he eventually “got kicked out of every school I ever went to” for fighting.
“You weren’t fighting because you were a tough guy,” he explains. “You were fighting because a dude comes up and punches you in the chest – so either you hit him back or not only is he going to punch you every day but all his friends are going to beat the s— out of you. You fight out of f—ing survival.
“I still have that in me, which gets me into trouble.”
