Kristen Stewart and Shia LaBeouf Have a Strange Conversation About Hands, and Everyone Is Confused

Shia LaBeouf and Kristen Stewart sat down for a recorded conversation on Variety‘s show Actors on Actors this weekend, and they got into some pretty strange territory. Fans are still trying to make sense of their discussion on hands and decide whether LaBeouf and Stewart are geniuses, maniacs or both.

LaBeouf and Stewart interviewed each other at the same time on a show Variety calls Actors on Actors. In it, big stars have a long-form, give and take conversation about craft, business and life in general, and it often gets interesting.

No one could say that this one failed there. Stewart and LaBeouf took their 41-minute talk all over the map, talking about each other’s performances — including LaBeouf’s new semi-autobiographical movie Honey Boy and Stewart’s new action hit Charlie’s Angels. However, they also got into some nebulous topics, such as the poetic, symbolic value of hands.

“Oh my God, man, I’m telling you, there’s like this whole — I’m writing about hands lately, a lot,” Stewart told LaBeouf. “Well, they do everything for you! They’re so lyrical and defining, and, I love people’s f—ing hands, yeah.”

As strange as that might sound to some, LaBeouf knew exactly what Stewart was talking about. In fact, his mind jumped straight to great example of hand-heavy acting by Stewart, in the trailer for her upcoming movie Seberg.

“There’s a shake in the… She seems like a very nervous person all the time,” LaBeouf said of Stewart’s character, Jean Seberg. “You, when you got the gun out, you’re with Mackie in the room, there’s like a small shake in your hand.”

“Oh yeah, it was kind of heavy,” Stewart said.

“Yeah, super heavy, the whole movie is heavy,” LaBeouf said. Here, the conversation took a funny turn as Stewart corrected him.

“No, guns are heavy,” she said.

Fans had a mixed response to the interview, particularly this hand-based clip that made the rounds on its own. Many thought that it was interesting — if strange — and felt like they could listen to these big personalities go on forever.

Of course, others were put off by the intensity and incongruity of the conversation, joking that the actors must have been nervous, or perhaps even under the influence. Many people made references to alcohol and cocaine, suggesting that Stewart and LaBeouf sounded inebriated.

Hopefully this is not the case, especially for LaBeouf, who worked hard to get clean and sober after he was arrested for public drunkenness in 2017. The actor spent a long time in treatment and was diagnosed with PTSD due to his tumultuous childhood. He detailed that time in the script for Honey Boy, which he began writing in therapy.

Honey Boy and Charlie’s Angels are in theaters now. Seberg premieres on Dec. 13, 2019.