Shia LaBeouf blames his ‘fractured little weak ego’ for feud with Alec Baldwin

Shia LaBeouf is reflecting on a past clash he experienced with former co-star Alec Baldwin.

During a conversation with the Hollywood Reporter, the actor discussed butting heads with Baldwin while working on the 2013 Broadway production Orphans before ultimately walking away from the project due to their tension.

LaBeouf revealed that the drama with Baldwin started after Al Pacino dropped out of the play, which left him devastated.

“By the time Baldwin got there, it was almost unfair. So he’s dealing with both my fractured little weak ego, right?” the “Transformers” star recalled. “All this hard prep that I’d done for two years, and my desperate need to show him all my prep, or that he would accept me somehow.”

Speaking to the outlet about his mindset at the time, he admitted, “Well, that got contentious in the room. Then he got competitive. That’s just what our relationship turned into.”

LaBeouf shared that during their feud, he was “living in the park” and “on steroids.”

“I was sleeping in Central Park. They keep horses there at this little fire basin,” he said. “And there’s a whole lot of room around there where you can just chill. You got to move every three or four hours and the guy comes around, but you can spend most of your time there.”

Later in the interview, LaBeouf mentioned that he and Baldwin have since made peace, noting that they’ve both “gone through a lot.”

“We’ve both been able to send each other love and make it right before all the madness happened on both sides,” the actor said. “We made it right. He’s a good guy. He’s just like me. Fear will make you move different. I found it came from having absolutely no spiritual life.”

Baldwin addressed their conflict in a 2014 Vulture essay, writing that “there was friction between us from the beginning.”

“One day he attacked me in front of everyone. He said, ‘You’re slowing me down, and you don’t know your lines. And if you don’t say your lines, I’m just going to keep saying my lines,'” Baldwin claimed. “I asked the company to break.”

The “Rust” star continued: “And I took the stage manager, with [director Daniel] Sullivan, to another room, and I said one of us is going to go. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll go.’ I said, ‘Don’t fire the kid, I’ll quit.’ They said no, no, no, no, and they fired him. And I think he was shocked.”

Read LaBeouf’s full interview with The Hollywood Reporter here.