New love, new frontiers for Shia LaBeouf!
Five months after stepping out together hand-in-hand, the Transformers star, 25, is still going strong with Karolyn Pho.
After splitting with Carey Mulligan in October, he met the Vietnamese-American stylist at a karaoke club in L.A.'s hip Echo Park neighborhood — and she's helping him expand and refine his culinary palate.
"Pâté? A cheese plate? That's a very 25-year-old deal," LaBeouf tells the Los Angeles Times. "I can get down with some fig jelly and some cheese on a cracker… [Karolyn's] having me try different things. I was scared of fish, 'cause of my upbringing, being Jewish. Gefilte can ruin your entire seafood life," jokes the star.
Another sign of maturity: LaBeouf is frank about using poor judgment during a February brawl at a bar in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
"He was just being demonstrative, antagonizing me in front of a crowd of 50 or 60," LaBeouf tells the LA Times of the man with whom he sparred. "My mother said it was below your dignity to engage in it."
At the time, LaBeouf, then prepping to shoot indie film The Wettest County in the World (about Depression-era bootleggers), couldn't help himself. "But there's something in a 24-year-old mind where you're in front of a lot of people you respect and love and you're getting ready to ship off and go do a movie about the most violent brothers in Georgia who sell moonshine and you're sort of rooting for a certain mentality," he explained. "And somebody approaches you and you're in the wrong thinking and you're drunk. I have no excuses. I'm not happy with it, but I don't think it's a calamity." (No charges were filed in the incident.)
Although the actor became a superstar via the mega-blockbuster Transformers franchise, he says he's ready for more sophisticated material."
"There's this coming-of-age thing that's happening within me," he says of his acting career. "I have these yearnings to do different things. Which way is this boy gonna go? I have no idea."
