Shia LaBeouf. (Patrick McMullan)

“You’re amazing,” Shia LaBeouf was heard wooing a young woman last night at the top of McKittrick Hotel, at the after-party for the The Cinema Society and Manifesto Yves Saint Laurent screening of Lawless. “You’re incredible. You’re an astronaut!”

“Did Shia just call that lady an astronaut?” a friend of The Observer asked, confused. If everyone was a tad difficult to understand, we understood, as Lawless had also starred a marble-mouthed Tom Hardy doing an American accent. The actor was regrettably absent from the screening–he was shooting Mad Max in Australia, we were told–which ruined our chances of doing our spot-on Bane impression for him. His loss.

Instead, we called over the hyper-maniac, hyper-masculine Mr. LaBeouf, whom  Harvey Weinstein had praised earlier in the evening as being the love child of himself, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

After all, if it wasn’t for Project Greenlight, the early 2000s HBO show that was, in Mr. Weinstein’s words, how the trio “gave back” to the young film community after Good Will Hunting, there would be no Shia LaBeouf: the winners of the second season of Hollywood reality contest went on to create The Battle of Shaker Heights, which Mr. Weinstein credited as the Mr. LaBeouf’s breakout debut. (He conveniently forgot about Holes, our favorite Shia LaBeouf feature, which premiered several months before Shaker Heights.)

Smoking a cigarette alongside co-star Dane DeHaan, Mr. LaBeouf looked straight out of the ’70s with a beard, brown suit and long hair pulled tightly into a bun. Whenever he spoke, he would rock up and down on the balls of his feet, as if getting ready to sprint away at a moment’s notice.

Since Mr. Hardy commanded so much of the film with his mumblecore performance, we asked if Lawless was shot before or after The Dark Knight Rises.

“Before. The shoot was about nine and a half weeks,” Mr. LaBeouf replied in a surprisingly deep voice. “Tom was in the middle of bulking up …”

“He hadn’t gained that last 20 pounds of fat yet,” Mr. DeHaan joked.

“Ha! Right, exactly. You know what I loved about his character in The Dark Knight?” Mr. LaBeouf asked. “I loved that he was too big to be sexy,” he said, increasing the speed of his bouncing. “You know, like he literally had too many muscles to be attractive, so he was just scary. That’s how it should be done!”

Mr. LaBeouf then zipped off to admire several other non-astronauts.

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