About That Time Shia LaBeouf And Tom Hardy Got Into A 'Tussle' On The Set Of Lawless

Now that John Hillcoat's brutal Prohibition tale Lawless has hit screens (read Movieline's review here) you can more vividly imagine the testosterone-and-moonshine fueled atmosphere that might have permeated the set, where, as Lawless legend has it, co-stars Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy had an unscripted scuffle. Nevertheless, while making the press rounds Hillcoat and LaBeouf both tried to squash rumors of the brotherly beef. Just a little innocent horseplay gone wrong?

LaBeouf and Hardy play Jack and Forrest Bondurant, two of a trio of bootlegging brothers who come to blows with the law (and, sometimes, each other) as they run a moonshine empire out of their hill country home base. A third brother, Howard (played by Jason Clarke) rounds out the sibling dynamic, but it's the strained relationship between the cardigan-clad family head Forrest and young, headstrong Jack that provides the bulk of the dramatic push and pull.

As the story goes, one day on set LaBeouf knocked out Hardy and Hardy "never did that roughhouse stuff with me again." The tangle first came to light in LaBeouf's fantastically unfiltered Details interview, though that was, understandably, overshadowed by his revelation about hooking up with Transformers co-star Megan Fox and other assorted truth bombs.

Then, while promoting his MMA pic Warrior, Hardy dropped a few cheeky quotes about the incident. "I got knocked out by Shia LaBeouf, actually," Hardy said to journalists, as recounted by Den of Geek. "In Wettest County, apparently." Apparently!

So now comes Hillcoat to set the record straight.

"There was this kind of, like, this challenging brotherly thing that starts going on with him," Hillcoat admitted in an interview with Yahoo. "But yeah, there was a tussle, but it wasn't quite the thing that was described."

LaBeouf, who's yet again spilled so many juicier, more distracting quotes of late — from his acid-dropping Method acting to his embracing of real sex in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac to his maybe-joke that he got the job by sending in a sex tape — tells MTV that the fistfight was borne out of love.

"That was straight love," he said. "There was a lot of love on that set in general. There was a lot of aggression in me and a lot of aggression on [Hardy's] side. We were playing brothers. There was a constant finger-in-the-ear [teasing] thing going on for a while."

[Yahoo, MTV]