Whoops! Shia LaBeouf Didn't Need to Drop Acid for Movie Preparation—the Script Said Ecstasy!

Charlie Countryman director said he didn't know of his star's method-acting plan, but that LaBeouf had told him he wanted to "push the envelope"

Not that Shia LaBeouf needed to take any drugs to prepare for his role in Charlie Countryman...but the one he did take turned out to be the wrong one.

"In the script, it's Carpathian ecstasy, a special hostel ecstasy that exists in maybe just Bucharest," director Fredrik Bond explained to Vulture last night about the romantic thriller, in which LaBeouf's average-Charlie character falls for the wife of a Romanian crime boss.

"So, Shia said he took acid? I didn't know he went out and said that," Bond said. "But it was always ecstasy in the script."

Considering LaBeouf had also implied that he was game to engage in real sex for Lars von Trier's erotically charged Nymphomaniac, dropping acid doesn't seem to be too far out there.

LaBeouf told USA Today last summer: "There's a way to do an acid trip like Harold & Kumar, and there's a way to be on acid. What I know of acting, Sean Penn actually strapped up to that chair in Dead Man Walking. These are the guys that I look up to."

"I'd never done acid before," he told MTV News at the Sundance Film Festival in January, having apparently gone through with his plan. "I remember sending [costar] Evan Rachel Wood tapes. I remember trying to conjure this and sending tapes. And Evan being like 'That's good, but that's not, but that is.'

"You reach out to friends and gauge where you're at," he continued. "I was sending tapes around and I'd get 50 percents from people and that just starts creeping me out. I was getting really nervous toward the end. Not cause I wanted to be on drugs—I'm not trying to mess with the set or anything like that. It's really just fear that propels people."

Well, the movie is in theaters tomorrow, so audiences can gauge whether LaBeauf's voluntary extra rehearsal time added anything to his performance.

Bond told Vulture that LaBeouf didn't tell him about his plan to take acid, but "he informed me that he was going to go out on a limb and push the envelope. He said he wants to make this like they did in the seventies; he was like, 'I want it to be like there's a gun against my head.'"