Shia LaBeouf slaps a fan during Elevator performance art project.
Elevator rides are pretty awkward with strangers, but this takes awkward to a whole new level.
Shia LaBeouf slapped a fan in the face during his latest performance art piece #Elevate. But only after the fan pressured him to do it.
“I’m a performance artist,” the fan — identified as student Oscar Plomer-Roberts — can be heard to saying in a YouTube video of the incident. “Can you help me with the completion of my next piece by punching me in the face?”
Shia LaBeouf didn’t really want to do it. “Do it. Don’t be a p**sy,” the Plomer-Roberts said after LaBeouf tells him he doesn’t want to punch him very hard. “I’ll do it to myself but I don’t like doing it to you, dude,” LaBeouf responded. “I just met you.”
But, made the “performance artist’s” dreams come true by slapping the fan.
According to Oxford’s student newspaper, Cherwell, Plomer-Roberts, a first-year English student at Oxford’s St. John’s College, thought Shia LaBeouf was “bored,” and he was looking for “weird s**t” to ask the actor.
“He had been standing in that elevator all day and must have been bored by questions about acting, film, art, etc. So I thought it would be a welcome change to ask him something he wouldn’t have heard before, and judging by his reaction, it seemed it was surprising.”
“The ‘performance artist’ thing was a sort of dig at Shia, because it sounds like some sort of crazy thing he’d do for the sake of ‘art,'” he said. “But I meant it as a joke, and he had the sense to take it as one.”
Shia LaBeouf and two other members of his performance art team were holed up in an elevator at England’s Oxford University student union building for 24 hours over the weekend. The #Elevate project gave students, fans, and random people the chance to talk with the actor about anything they liked.
