Last Saturday at the Delancey Street F train station on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a New York City advertising art director was punched in the face by an unknown assailant who said only, “This is because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf!” According to Cosmopolitan, the victim, Mario Licato, recently received a voicemail from the actor apologizing for the incident. Describing LeBeouf’s phone voice as “bummed,” Licato delineated the message:
It was a pretty long voicemail. He was like, “Hey, this is Shia LaBeouf … I just read an article that you were punched in the face because you look like me?” And he was like, “Aw, man. That sucks. I’m so sorry. But I get it. It’s happened to me before.” And then he was like, “I don’t know. I wish I was in New York. I’d come bring you soup.” He was just like, “This sucks. I don’t even know what to say. I’m sorry. People are just crazy. Just because you look like me?”
I was obviously laughing the whole time. And then he was like, “Here’s my phone number. Don’t give it to anybody. Please, please, call me back. Call me back if you want to. We could chat. Let’s giggle over this. Maybe there’s a silver lining in all this. But call me back.” And then he was like, “And once again, this is Shia LaBeouf, the guy you got hit for looking like. And yeah, man, I’m sorry. I’m just really sorry.” And he was like “Keep your head up, G.” And that was it.
Licato and LaBeouf apparently have connected since the voicemail, perhaps so that LaBeouf can extol the virtues of wearing a paper bag over one’s head when one looks like Shia LaBeouf:
Maybe the photo’s staged, but surely Licato has earned that privilege.
Regarding the assailant—whom witnesses describe as a muscular 6-foot-tall bro type in his mid-20s—police have made no arrests at this point, perhaps because they followed him north to Murray Hill and lost him in a crowd of dudes who look exactly like Channing Tatum.