The greatest acting performance of all time, according to Shia LaBeouf
Before his career was derailed by a series of off-screen incidents, Shia LaBeouf had won plenty of admirers for turning his back on the superstardom that was being laid in front of him in favour of dedicating himself to the art of performance.
By the time he was in his mid-20s, the former Disney Channel favourite had already worked with some of the biggest names in the business in a number of box office smash hits, which made it look as though he’d been hand-picked as Hollywood’s next A-lister.
LaBeouf shared the screen with Keanu Reeves in Constantine and Will Smith in I, Robot, played the lead in Michael Bay’s initial Transformers trilogy, steered preposterous technological thriller Eagle Eye to great success, swung from vines as Indiana Jones’ son in Steven Spielberg’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and sat under the learning tree of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s legacy sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Clearly, though, LaBeouf wanted to be an actor and not a movie star, which makes sense given both his penchant for immersing himself fully into character and his choice for the single greatest performance in the history of celluloid.
David Ayer’s Fury saw him fully embrace the life of a World War II tank gunner by doing everything in his power to remain as authentic as possible, while he even covered himself in very real tattoos when he reunited with the director for crime thriller The Tax Collector. For him, there was an exact moment where that type of performance punctured the mainstream, and it came in one of the finest movies ever made.
In an interview with Carl Froch, LaBeouf described Robert De Niro’s Academy Award-winning work as Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull as not just “the greatest performance ever of all time” or “the best performance ever laid down by any actor ever without a doubt,” but he called it “the pinnacle, the Sugar Ray Leonard of acting.”
“That’s extraordinary. At the time, he did that; that revolutionised acting,” he explained. “Because before him, Brando had reinvented the wheel, and for about 30 years, there was nothing until you get to De Niro and Raging Bull. And that’s when all the Christian Bale stuff started: the massive transformations, then stopping the movie, taking eight months off, gaining weight, losing weight.”
From LaBeouf’s perspective, there was screen acting before Raging Bull, and there was screen acting after Raging Bull. It was a labour of love and an arduous undertaking for both De Niro and Scorsese, but the personal and professional tribulations were worth it and then some in the end, with the end result an all-time great of American cinema and a touchstone for multiple generations of performers who wanted to emulate what he’d brought to the table.
