The Kid Gets the Picture

One

week shy of his 21st birthday in June, Shia LaBeouf spent a morning learning to drive bizarre, top-secret vehicles alongside Harrison Ford. This fantasy gig started, as Hollywood fairy tales often do, with a summons to Steven Spielberg's office two months earlier. "Steven said, 'You ever seen Indiana Jones?'" the boyish-looking actor recounts, while chain smoking outside the Burbank, Calif., strip mall where he buys his daily Boston Market chicken and Robek's fruit smoothie ("The parking lot of dreams," LaBeouf calls his suburban stomping ground). "I said, 'Of course I've seen Indiana Jones.' He said, 'Well, we're making another one, and I'd like for you to be in it.' My heart went nuts. I've had anxiety attacks before, but I've never felt that—where you can't breathe and your stomach tenses." At some point LaBeouf did what you do when you're being suddenly being offered Hollywood leading-man candidacy: he said yes.

As the human star of this summer's warring-alien-robot event film, Transformers; the voice of the lead penguin in the animated Surf's Up; the vulnerable bad boy in this spring's surprise hit, the Hitchcockian teen thriller Disturbia; and Spielberg's hand-picked choice to co-star with Ford and Cate Blanchett in the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie due next May, LaBeouf is blowing up faster than a stunt car on a Michael Bay set. In an age when potential action heroes seem to be either rugged '80s relics like Ford and Sylvester Stallone or sensitive thespians willing to double up on their bench presses like Tobey Maguire and Orlando Bloom, LaBeouf is that rarest of screen creatures, the scrappy kid next door. "Shia is within everyone's reach," says Spielberg. "He's every mother's son, every father's spitting image, every young kid's best pal and every girl's possible dream." With his giant brown eyes, lanky frame and indiscernible ethnicity (he's Jewish), he is a relatable foil for shiny robots and iconic heroes. "[DreamWorks] cast him in several bigger-than-life films," says Spielberg, "because we felt those films needed a realistic human anchor."

The authenticity that helps him ground those fantastic tales was earned through some harsh beginnings. LaBeouf grew up in Los Angeles' Echo Park, a mainly Latino working-class neighborhood, the only child of a drug-addicted Vietnam-vet father and a hippie-ballerina mother with a bum knee. "My family's lineage is five generations of artists who never made it," LaBeouf says. His first name, which rhymes with hi-ya, was the name of his maternal grandfather, a Catskills comic. His last name, pronounced La-Buff, is a name shared with his paternal grandmother, a Beatnik poet.

LaBeouf's father was a professional clown. When Shia was 2 years old, the family put together a street act to raise cash. "Latins are into clowns," says Shia. "We were the only white family around, so we figured we could do the look-at-us thing and dance around like a bunch of idiots." LaBeouf's father stole a maid's cart from a Best Western, decorated it with paint and streamers, stocked it with hot dogs and shaved ice and took his family to the park in clown costumes to perform. "I hated selling hot dogs. I hated dressing up in clown," LaBeouf says. "But the minute somebody would buy into my thing and buy a hot dog from my family because of my shtick, my parents would look at me like, 'All right, man.' Besides performing, I've never had that validation from anything else I've ever done in my life."

From an early age, LaBeouf was exposed to adult pastimes. With his dad he watched Steve McQueen movies and went to Rolling Stones concerts and AA meetings, where, at age 10, he learned to smoke and play cards. He met a kid whose surfboard he really liked. "He was on Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman," LaBeouf says. "He had all the stuff I wanted, materially. When you're in school, if you've got the new Filas on, no one's gonna punch you that day." The key to new Filas, LaBeouf figured, was to get paid to clown around.