Christy Carlson Romano, who got her start on the Disney Channel sitcom “Even Stevens,” talks about her experience working alongside co-star Shia LaBeouf. Speaking to Amanda Hirsch of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast on Tuesday, Romano said she and LaBeouf were “like oil and water,” despite being only 14 and 12, respectively, at the time.
Romano explained that their incompatibility on set came from the way they were raised.
“I was raised and raised to be that type A, I mean exactly like Ren Stevens. Like, you know your lines, you hit your goals, you don’t make mistakes,” she said. “You’re a New York kid, like that comes with a certain amount of echelon…I was trying to go to pre-college at Juilliard…everything we did, my mom called it cross-training, came with a certain amount of training.”
In comparison, LaBeouf has long spoken openly about his tumultuous childhood and said his father was a recovering drug addict and sometimes violent. “He was kind of a tramp kid from Venice Beach,” Romano said. “It’s like this kind of wandering fun, but also a very chaotic and very scary lifestyle, and he was very young to have that.” She compared her upbringing to the lifestyle depicted in the 1995 Larry Clark film “Kids.”
Romano praised LaBeouf for finding his manager at just eight years old; the “Transformers” and “Holes” star “had a dream and made it happen himself,” she added.
“Even Stevens” ran from 2000 to 2003 and followed Ren (Romano) and Louis (LaBeouf), the two younger siblings of the Stevens family depicted as having opposing and often conflicting personalities.
This isn’t the first time Romano has spoken out about his relationship with LaBeouf. Earlier this year, the actress posted – then deleted – a statement saying “Shia doesn’t deserve to be on the Rushmore. I’m going to write a Substack about this so you can understand why,” to
On Tuesday, the actress also posted a photo of herself with LaBeouf and his father on the set of “Even Stevens” on Instagram. “I recently found this photo. Shia and I spent 3 years of our lives next to each other in adjacent trailers, we both endured painful childhoods,” she wrote. “If only we could have been there for each other, but we were each going through our own battles and could barely take care of ourselves.” She concluded by writing that she would “finally” share everything in her upcoming memoir, “Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star,” which will be available October 6.
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