‘Fury’ inspires Shia LaBeouf to make peace with Alec Baldwin

LOS ANGELES—“Me and Alec Baldwin just got good,” disclosed Shia LaBeouf to us recently, apparently inspired by the brotherly love, friendship and camaraderie he experienced while cooped up in a tank with Brad Pitt and three other actors on the “Fury” set. Shia and Alec had a widely reported spat during rehearsals for their 2013 Broadway play, “Orphans.” Amid a public exchange of insults between Shia and Alec, the former was replaced by Ben Foster.

“I have been reconnecting with people that I had problems with,” said Shia, sporting a full beard, white shirt and jeans in this chat at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “I am feeling love from them,” added the actor, who figured in head-scratching antics and got mired in headline-making troubles, including a plagiarism controversy.

“That’s been a real blessing,” he said of making peace with Alec and other folks. “Because Alec is a dude I have always looked up to. I felt so bad about our dismount. I’m trying to make good with as many people that I can lately.”

Shia, as Boyd “Bible” Swan, Brad, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal make up a crew inside a Sherman tank that goes on a deadly mission behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany in David Ayer’s “Fury.”

LABEOUF. Has been reconnecting with people he had problems with. RUBEN V. NEPALES

“I don’t feel alone,” exulted Shia, who exhibited none of the eccentric behavior that landed him in the news. As the bible-quoting tank gunner Bible, he gives a quietly moving performances in the WWII action-drama.

“This is a family,” he said of his four costars. “This is just straight-up love by the men in this movie. That’s the other thing about the army. Society doesn’t accept men unconditionally loving each other, except in war.”

“I feel a lot of love, especially in this movie,” he emphasized. “I never felt so much love.”

“Just straight love,” Shia answered about how it was working with Brad, who is also one of the film’s producers. “He was never a superior. We were equals.”

But, first, there was “drama” between him and Brad. He recounted, “In the first three days of the boot camp, I had a fight with our boot camp trainers. Brad didn’t stick up for me. We were doing pushups, and I was done. I looked up at our commanding officer. I was like, ‘Officer Vance, I can’t do it anymore.’ Brad just looked over at me. I just thought, no way, man! I got really upset about it.

“I went to the latrines and was crying by myself. Brad came over. He put his arms around me, and he didn’t say anything to me. He hugged me. No actor I ever worked with hugged me like that.”

Shia offered another plus factor in working with Brad: “Meeting somebody like Brad allows me to have an easier time with fame, because he has made peace with it.”

To play a member of a tough but weary crew that has survived skirmishes in North Africa, Belgium, Normandy and, now, the German border, Shia felt he had to do something physically.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, man, something has to happen.’ So, I took this tooth out. I tattooed ‘Surrender to Jesus,’ and I felt that. Yeah, you give it everything you got.”

Shia’s “Fury” filming experience may have truly made an impact on him. “I find that I am far more positive in my outlook on life,” he claimed. “I am far more hopeful.”

This articulate, nice young man seems hard to reconcile with the Shia LaBeouf we read about last June, when he was arrested for acting disorderly and screaming obscenities at a “Cabaret” production starring Michelle Williams and Alan Cumming in Broadway.

“I don’t think there’s only one true self,” he said when asked about what seems to be two Shias. “I believe there are many true selves. There are multiple selves for all of us.”

He countered one of his reported statements that he will quit acting: “I will be doing this for the rest of my life. How long I live isn’t something I know about. But, as long as I’m around, I will be making movies or acting. I love it! It’s been the most consistent relationship with anything I have had in my whole life.”

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