Rumours have persisted for years that Shia LaBeouf ‘knocked out’ Tom Hardy on the set of a movie, so much so that the star was forced to respond.
The supposed incident was alleged to have taken place when the two were filming Lawless, a 2021 film starring the two men.
Tension between the pair grew as the film went on, culminating in them apparently scrapping off-set.
Hardy himself claimed that he was ‘knocked out’, but it seems he was speaking in jest, as LaBeouf called these rumours ‘a bunch of bullshit’.
When asked by Hot Ones host Sean Evans, LaBeouf said: “We used to wrestle all the time and [Tom Hardy’s] a big fucking person, especially then.
“He was getting ready [to act in The Dark Knight Rises as] Bane.”
LaBeouf recounted how Hardy barged in after a gym session and the two began scrapping, saying: “We used to fuck with each other all the time but it just so happened that, this one week, my girlfriend was in town and he runs into the room.
“The girl I was with at the time was terrified.
“She covered up and she ran into the kitchen and he picked me up and I didn’t have nothing on so now I’m naked on his shoulder. We’re in the hallway, we’re wrestling around.”
LaBeouf revealed that for ‘the rest of the shoot’, Hardy went around telling the crew and cast that the controversial Transformers star had knocked him out.
LaBeouf at the time of the interview was resurgent in Hollywood, widely praised for writing Honey Boy, what he claimed was an autobiographical look at his own life in which he played his abusive father.
He later revealed that the film’s portrayal of his father was ‘f*cking nonsense’, saying: “I turned the knob up on certain shit that wasn’t real. My dad never hit me, never”.
He went on to say, on Jon Bernthal’s podcast: “My dad was so loving to me my whole life.
“Fractured, sure. Crooked, sure. Wonky, for sure. But never was not loving, never was not there. He was always there… and I’d done a world press tour about how fucked he was as a man.”
The actor now finds himself in hot water legally for a separate issue, after ex-partner FKA Twigs has sued LaBeouf claiming ‘sexual battery, battery, assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and gross negligence’.
Though LaBeouf faced a Hollywood exile after the allegations came to light, he recently ended this by starring in box office and critical flop Megalopolis.
Joining him in the cast was another ‘cancelled’ figure in Jon Voight, an outspoken Trump supporter who accused Joe Biden of ‘electoral fraud’.
Director Francis Ford Coppola said of hiring the pair for the movie: “What I didn’t want to happen is that we’re deemed some woke Hollywood production that’s simply lecturing viewers.
“The cast features people who were cancelled at one point or another. There were people who are archconservatives and others who are extremely politically progressive.
“But we were all working on one film together. That was interesting, I thought.”
LaBeouf has denied allegations of abuse from FKA Twigs.
