Shia LaBeouf first rose to fame starring in Disney’s Channel’s Even Stevens, but it was 2003’s Holes that got his film career going. LaBeouf starred as lead protagonist Stanley Yelnats in the cinematic adaptation of Louis Sachar’s same-named novel, and the movie was met with positive critical reception. More than two decades later, I know I’m not alone in considering it one of the more underrated House of Mouse offerings worth streaming with your Disney+ subscription, but LaBeouf has now gone into great detail about his “horrible” experience filming Holes.
The actor was asked if he liked working on Holes during a fan Q&A at Steel City Comic-Con. He didn’t mince words with his response, captured by @TreyEversman. LaBeouf first recalled how though he considered Holes his “first real job” following his TV work, it was jolting when Disney moved him over to the popular family movie because he’d built “a family, a tribe” with the cast and crew of Even Stevens, and now he was in this “new tribe.” He continued:
Then Jon Voight is walking around in character, and I’d never been around somebody like that, who doesn’t break. And he’s spitting these sunflower seeds around, and he’s mean, and I’m like, ‘Nah, this isn’t going to work.’ My dad is my dad. He didn’t know nothing about that, either. So him and my dad had to have a whole thing. Oh, boy. Because my dad’s not diplomatic — at this point, he’s only four years out of prison. And Jon Voight is playing these games, my dad don’t care. Jon had to check my dad, which was healthy for my family. A lot went on there. Also, my dad was hitting on Sigourney Weaver all the time, and that didn’t work.
Jon Voight and Sigourney Weaver respectively starred in Holes as Mr. Sir and Warden Walker, respectively. The latter ran the juvenile detention camp where Stanley Yelnats was sent to, and the former assisted her in running the operation, from disciplining the inmates to shooting any yellow-spotted lizards that wandered on sight. It sounds like things got tense between Voight and Shia LaBeouf’s father because of Voight’s method acting choice, and clearly the hitting on Sigourney Weaver didn’t help.
But that was just the start of Shia LaBeouf’s troubles on Holes. Needless to say it was hot filming the movie out in the desert, but actually performing scenes inside of one of those holes was way worse. As LaBeouf explained:
It was 150 degrees in the hole. So you could only be in the hole for five-minute windows, per the Screen Actors Guild. So they had a rep sitting out there with a stopwatch — you’d do these takes, and he’d be like, ‘Five minutes,’ and we’d have to jump out of the hole even if we were in the middle of the take.
That sounds brutal, and I do not envy those kids for having to act under such extreme heat, even if they were required to get out after five minutes no matter what. Shia LaBeouf then talked about the time he witnessed his costar Jake M. Smith, who played Squid, being literally blasted out of his trailer:
There was this kid who used to have a toothpick in his mouth all the time. That kid, Jake. We all had these half trailers, and I was in the half trailer with him. I’m sitting in the trailer with my dad one time, we’re playing Gin Rummy, and I hear this huge bang. The whole thing rocks. And I walk outside, and this dude has flown out of his side of the trailer, and the whole wall of the trailer has blown out. He’s not just out there; the whole wall is blown out of the trailer. And it’s because the refrigeration unit, it was so hot in Ridgecrest that the refrigerator… there was like an oxygen bomb that went off in his refrigerator and blew this kid across the desert.
Shia LaBeouf capped off this portion of the panel by saying that Holes was a “pretty intense shoot,” and that he’s not sure if a company like Netflix could get away with that kind of stuff happening on a movie these days. It’s unfortunate LeBeouf and the other actors had to endure such conditions, although at least when it came to Jon Voight, that encounter between the elder actor and his father didn’t stop them from working together again. They later costarred in 2007’s Transformers and 2024’s Megalopolis, though the latter collaboration only happened when they made amends after getting into a heavy phone argument years earlier, as was revealed in the documentary Megadoc.
Although a Holes TV adaptation was announced around this time last year, word came in last month that Disney+ decided to not move forward with the series following the production of the pilot. So this movie will continue to be the only book-to-screen adaptation of this entry on Louis Sachar’s body of work. Meanwhile, as of August 2025, it’s unclear if Shia LaBeouf’s next movie, Angel of Death, will move forward due to creative clashes between the director and its coproducers, per World of Reel.
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