Rise to Fame
Getting himself an agent at 11 meant cold-calling and pretending to be his own manager. It worked. He landed Even Stevens on Disney Channel, won a Daytime Emmy, and graduated to Steven Spielberg territory fast. Disturbia (2007) was the audition nobody knew was an audition. Steven Spielberg cast him in Transformers that same year, and by the third film, he was earning $15 million a picture. He walked away from the franchise at 25, which was the first sign that the next chapter wasn't going to be straightforward.
In the Spotlight
The FKA Twigs lawsuit, filed in 2020 alleging physical and psychological abuse, settled out of court in July 2025 with terms kept confidential. Between court dates, he converted to Catholicism on December 31, 2023, and took roles in Megalopolis and Salvable. A Ridley Scott-produced thriller wrapped in 2025. Then in February 2026, a Mardi Gras arrest in New Orleans led to a court-ordered substance abuse program. Two steps toward respectability, one step into a bar fight in the French Quarter.
Side Notes
The 2013-2014 performance art spiral is one of the more bewildering celebrity pivots on record. He plagiarized a Daniel Clowes graphic novel in a short film, then plagiarized his own apologies (lifting from Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg, and Robert McNamara statements), then declared the whole enterprise 'meta-modernist performance art.' One credited collaborator said he'd never actually met LaBeouf. In 2019, he wrote and starred in Honey Boy, playing a fictionalized version of his own father. The self-examination was more honest than the performance art, even if it was also a movie.