AKM-GSIAfter a brief intermission, Shia LaBeouf and Alec Baldwin are at it again, and this time, things are a bit more heated.
After the 26-year-old Lawless star left the much-hyped Broadway show Orphans due to "creative differences" and subsequently posted a bizarre email exchange between himself, director Daniel Sullivan, and former costars Alec Baldwin and Tom Sturridge on Twitter, Baldwin has now responded to Shia's social media snafu, saying he was "very disappointed" by his former costar's microblogging post.
"Regarding of what people feel about the events that happened, you expect communications to be private, because everyone wants this process to be as collegial as possible," Baldwin told the The New York Times over the telephone on Thursday. "Everyone is very sad about what's happened."
Shia's philosophical missive to Sullivan—in which calls his dad "a s--t human" and rambles over what it means to be a man—was also revealed to be heavily lifted from Tom Chiarella's Esquire essay published in 2009. Chiarella has since responded to LaBeouf's letter, describing the memo as "kind-of-flattering" plagiarism.
"I can't make myself care too much about Shia LaBeouf plagiarizing my words in his letter to Alec Baldwin over some spat over some play," he writes to Esquire.com. "He loaded a few paragraphs of what I wrote in a 2009 issue of Esquire into his cannons, attached them to the phrase 'What I know of men' and then fired straight into the broadside of the HMS Baldwin. And with that, it seems, the battle between the two of them quelled."
He continues, "What can I say? Am I outraged? Of course not. It actually makes me happy that my words were some succor to the kid, that he found them wise enough (or high enough on the Google search, anyway) to foist them off as his own. Any writer wants to be read, remembered, considered. A late-night e-mail, double-spaced, vaguely bullet-pointed—this too is a kind of literary memory, I guess, especially when you leak it on Twitter to evince a magnanimous self."
Chiarella goes on to explain he can't punish LaBeouf in our "clip-and-paste universe" but jokes he also likes "royalty checks directed to my little house in Indiana."
LaBeouf has since been replaced by Ben Foster, who previously auditioned for the role and will begin rehearsals today.
Orphans is set to begin previews March 19. Here's hoping this is the end of the backstage drama.