Shia LaBeouf and the Busted Hand of Destiny

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Last summer, Shia LaBeouf found himself involved in a near-fatal collision at the busy L.A. intersection of LaBrea and Fountain; an oncoming vehicle ran a red light, sending his Ford F-150 rolling onto its side. While he walked away from the accident, it wasn't a completely happy ending: LaBeouf refused a breathalyzer at the scene of the crime, leading to a DUI charge, and his hand -- which it turns out was hanging outside the truck's window -- was severely injured after being crushed into the pavement. Surgeons operated that night for four hours, saving his digits from amputation and a summer tentpole from a stumpy lead. But besides presenting Jay Leno with his molted pinkie nail as a trophy, LaBeouf had yet to open up about the ordeal, until now.

Speaking exclusively to EW.com, Shia spoke frankly and pragmatically about the suckiness of burning through hundreds of thousands of Paramount's dollars a day as the country's top hand surgeons fashion tiny phalanges out of pieces of your hip:

"I've had screws and plates put in. They put a screw in one of my knuckles. And they shaved a piece of bone off my hip and made a [bone for my] finger out of it....You know, what can you do? You just gotta grab your balls and move forward. There's nothing else to do. [...]

It's hard to do anything. It's hard to button your pants or brush your teeth, let alone jump off a three-story building into a pad. This movie was the most physical thing I've ever had to do, and I had to do it with a broken hand."

The first voice I heard when I came out of surgery was Harrison's. Harrison [Ford] called me on the phone and said, "Hey, are you okay?" I said, "Yeah, I'm good." He said, "Well, then you need to get back to work." I said, "Are you serious?" He said, "That's the way this cookie crumbles."

Expressing hesitance, his Indiana Jones father then shared a sweet story about an ankle injury incurred of the set of What Lies Beneath, and reassuringly suggested that his young protege ignore the doctors' orders and do as he did -- submerge himself in a baththub filled with Wild Turkey, and not come until he could no longer detect the sensation of a nail being pounded into the back of his hand.

· 'Transformers' star Shia LaBeouf opens up about his injuries [EW]



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