David Ayer’s Fury had two battles happening: one in the film and one off-camera on the set. In a new interview on an episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Scott Eastwood, who played Sergeant Miles in the 2014 war film, revealed that he came close to throwing hands with Shia LaBeouf on the set. And it actually took Brad Pitt to physically step in to stop the fight.
Eastwood says that LaBeouf, who played Boyd “Bible” Swan, went full method for his role, even pulling out his own teeth and cutting his face while preparing for the role. His actions led Eastwood to privately decide, in his words, that LaBeouf was “crazy” and someone to keep his distance from. “Okay, this guy’s crazy,” Eastwood recalled thinking. “I’m just going to keep clear from this guy cuz I don’t really… I don’t play this game. This is not— you go and do that, but there’s plenty of ways to do a performance in a movie and be professional also, right?”
Unfortunately, they didn’t keep their distance.
Then came the tipping point: during a scene where Eastwood’s character was scripted to spit tobacco onto the tank the two actors’ characters shared, LaBeouf lost his cool. He reportedly took issue with Eastwood’s spitting and apparently believed it was disrespectful to the vehicle. During the interview, Eastwood reveals that LaBeouf confronted him over it, and things escalated quite fast from there.
“Finally I just said, enough’s enough,” he told Shepard. “I said, ‘Hey, [expletive] you.’ I said, ‘Stop pulling your [expletive].’ I said, ‘I’m going to whoop your ass.’” LaBeouf, in Eastwood’s telling, “popped off” and got “froggy” before Pitt and the rest of the crew broke it up before it went any further.
Eastwood joked that director David Ayer, watching the whole thing unfold, was probably thinking, “The flowers are blooming. I planted the seed” — and yelling for the cameras to keep rolling.
Pitt has previously given his own side of it to British GQ, saying he initially sided with LaBeouf because he thought Eastwood was disrespecting the tank until he checked the script and realized Eastwood was just doing his job.
Fury Wasn’t LaBeouf’s Only Near-Fight With a Co-Star
LaBeouf’s intensity has reportedly nearly boiled over into a real fight with a co-star before. Two years earlier, he and Tom Hardy reportedly clashed on the set of Lawless in 2012. Director John Hillcoat later confirmed on a Reddit AMA that there was, in his words, “definitely a fight” between the two that got serious enough that both actors had to be physically restrained, though he shot down rumors that LaBeouf had actually knocked Hardy out (a rumor that has been going around Hollywood for some time).
Hollywood’s History of Near-Fights That Almost Were
FOS has covered this territory before with Sylvester Stallone’s account of Steven Seagal running from a fight with Jean-Claude Van Damme at a Hollywood party in the ’90s, a decades-long feud that similarly relied on secondhand retellings and left fans debating who actually would have won. LaBeouf’s on-set history is shaping up to be its own version of the same.
Thankfully, Eastwood says he and LaBeouf are now on good terms. But between the tooth-pulling, the self-inflicted cuts, and now two documented near-fights (and there’s probably plenty more) with co-stars across two different films, LaBeouf’s method-acting reputation keeps finding new chapters.
RELATED: Sylvester Stallone Says Steven Seagal Ran From A Jean-Claude Van Damme Fight
Fury is currently available to stream on Netflix, alongside rental/purchase options on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play.
