New York man punched for looking like Shia LaBeouf: ‘It’s like ... your face makes me angry’
Mario Licato has been punched before. Once. In the back of the head, not the front. But that was "definitely not for looking like Shia LaBeouf."
Those days are gone.
The 26-year-old New Yorker found himself face-to-fist in a Lower East Side subway station over the weekend when he crossed paths with a guy who apparently has it in for the "Transformers" actor — and sucker-punched the similar-looking Licato as they passed each other in the stairway.
"I'm walking up the stairs to get out of the station and some guy's walking down to get into the station, and I just see a fist coming at me," Licato said Wednesday by phone from New York. "I'm stumbling down the stairs and I hear, 'That's because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf!'"
He said he was knocked out briefly from a combination of the blow and the fall. "I was gushing with blood from my face, my glasses were split in half. I'm just laying on the ground, and I woke up with people around me, and they were like, 'Did you know him? Did you know him? What's going on?'" Licato had no idea.
LaBeouf has made a name for himself in recent years for bad behavior, including being arrested and jailed in New York City after disrupting a performance of "Cabaret" on Broadway, and oddball performance-art pieces. Remember his "Nyphomaniac: Volume 1" red carpet appearance in Berlin in 2014, where he wore a paper bag on his head that said, "I am not famous anymore"? And then his 2014 #IAMSORRY show in L.A., which saw him with a different paper bag on his head after he admitted he'd plagiarized illustrator Daniel Clowes' work for his short film "HowardCantour.com"?
More recently, LaBeouf spent 24 hours riding an elevator at Oxford University and chatting with whoever stopped by, with a live feed running the whole time. During that event, on request, he reluctantly hit another performance artist in the face.
A New York Police spokeswoman confirmed that officers had responded to a radio call about an alleged assault at 8:30 p.m. Saturday.
"As [he] was exiting the subway via the stairway, he was hit," the spokeswoman said Wednesday. According to the report, the assailant said, "This is because you look like Shia LaBeouf." The perp, a white male, was either 5-foot-9 or 6-foot-3, depending on which witness you believe. Licato is 5-foot-7. EMTs responding to the 911 call checked out his black eye and a gash on his head.
Licato said he asked witnesses, "Am I crazy, or did he say, 'That's because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf'? And they were like, 'Nope, that's what we heard too.'"
His mom cried, he said, when she heard he'd been hit. His parents, who also live in New York, hopped in a car and took him out to dinner the next night.
"Now she's just like, 'What the hell? All my friends are talking about it,'" Licato said. "'I'm walking into the store and I see you in the New York Post — and Prince. You've got a full page. Soak it all in.'"
The bruised digital-advertising art director was back at work Monday, but for an out-of-office shoot. His friends and colleagues — coincidentally, Licato previously was a designer at a firm that revamped the Los Angeles Times website in 2012 — have been burying him with emails about the incident. Gothamist was the first outlet to pick up the story.
The subway assailant "saw me for a split second and was like, 'I ... hated Shia LaBeouf's last performance-art piece, I'm taking this guy down,'" Licato joked.
He hasn't yet heard from LaBeouf, but he's been compared to the quirky Angeleno actor before. Just not like this.
"Usually it's like, 'Oh, you look like Shia LaBeouf!,' and it's kind of a cute thing. 'Thanks!'" Licato said. "Now it's like, 'I'm punching you because I hate Shia LaBeouf, and your face makes me angry.'"
Follow Christie D'Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ. Follow the Ministry of Gossip @LATcelebs.
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