Shia LaBeouf.

Shia LaBeouf will have his first major post-Transformers moment with the arrival of his prohibition western Lawless, but the actor already made waves recently when he appeared in an artsy Sigur Rós video directed by Alma Ha’rel. How did he get involved? “I wrote a fan letter,” LaBeouf told us last night at the Lawless premiere. “I saw Bombay Beach, the movie that Alma Har’el made. It touched me. I told her so. She told me she’d like to work with me. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘I got this Sigur Rós thing.’ I said, ‘Cool. Can I get involved?’ And at the time, it was a different idea. So we worked on the idea for a week.”

In the video, LaBeouf plays a man in a tempestuous relationship, and he gets to show an emotional, mature side of himself that isn’t often tested by battling-robots movies. He also appears frontally nude in the video, which is definitely something you wouldn’t expect to see in a Transformers film. Did he feel any inhibitions about it?

“Well, we were playing a couple in the midst of a drug-addled binge,” said LaBeouf. “It was extremely abusive. And the direction from Alma was: You two wake up in bed after having made love all night, and now starts the bad side of this. And so we go to the blocking tape markers on the floor, and we both get there. [The actress is] nude and I’m in my clothes and I’m thinking, There’s no way I would have slept with you in my clothes and gotten up with my clothes on and come to this moment. If you’re going to be naked, I should be naked as well.”

“We agreed, and that’s what we did,” he said simply, adding, “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, he’s fucking naked now.’”

Shia LaBeouf Explains That Nude Sigur Rós Video