Back in 2012, Tom Hardy co-starred in the movie Lawless with Shia LaBeouf. The movie was a solid outing for both actors, but the most interesting item to come out of the project was the report that the two actors got into a fight on the set. John Hillcoat was the director of the film, and he’s now come out to say that the fight did happen, though any rumors that Tom Hardy was taken down were greatly exaggerated.
John Hillcoat is the director behind the new film Triple 9, and as part of his promotion for his new project, he recently took part in an AMA on Reddit. During the online interrogation, Hillcoat was asked about the rumor that Tom Hardy was actually knocked out on the set of Lawless by Shia LaBeouf. Hillcoat did confirm the altercation, but not the result.
There was definitely a fight between them. It escalated to the point where they had to both be restrained. But I was very pleased to hear it didn't go that way because I would hate to see the outcome.
Tom Hardy himself had been the one that said he’d been "knocked out," though to be fair, the way he said it made it sound like he was screwing with people, indicating the ridiculousness of the idea that he would have been put down by Shia LaBeouf. From what John Hillcoat says here, it sounds like the two may have been separated before the altercation ever actually came to blows. We’d have to say we agree with Hillcoat that the outcome would not have been pretty. We don’t want to take anything away from LaBeouf but Tom Hardy is a pretty big dude, and Shia...is not. Here’s the movie in question.
We can’t imagine what would have led the two to almost get in a physical altercation. Ok, actually we can. Shia LaBeouf has had an interesting career of late, made up of odd performance-art pieces and strange viral videos as much as it has him acting in movies. A couple years ago, the actor was arrested after allegedly harassing a homeless man for hours. This surprised literally nobody. We can’t imagine what led the former Even Stevens actor to pull something like that, but if LaBeouf got in Tom Hardy’s face in a similar way, we can only image how Hardy would have responded.
Whatever the result, we don’t imagine we’ll see the two on screen together anytime soon. Which is actually too bad, as Lawless was pretty good.
