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“Dance Moms” star Maddie Ziegler, who stars opposite Shia LaBeouf in Sia’s “Elastic Heart” music video, says the actor warned her not to make the same mistakes that he had. “He actually told me, he was like, ‘Don’t ever drink. Don’t ever do this. Don’t ever do what I did,'” she tells Elle. “And I was like, ‘Aw. I feel so bad!’ I was just learning from him.”
The 12-year-old notes, “He really gets into character. He warms up and does all this crazy stuff before he starts. He was, like, running around the cage, just punching it. He was screaming. He was doing all these push-ups. Oh my god. I was just standing there, like, ‘Oh, hey!’ Just trying to start a conversation. And he kept screaming. I was like, ‘How could someone run like that?’ I’d be so out of breath.”
In the video, Ziegler and LaBeouf engage in an interpretive dance, inspired by two animals fighting. Ziegler says she was acting like a “hissing” wolf. The pre-teen explains, “I’m trying to hurt him. I’m, like, the mean one, the bad one; I’m the one who’s strong.” Ziegler says the worst part of filming was having to slap, bite and punch LaBeouf. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this!'” she recalls. “And he was like, ‘Punch me. Go ahead. Go ahead.’ I was doing it really soft and he was like, ‘No. You have to punch me hard.’ He wouldn’t move on until I really punched him hard. I was so scared, but I went ahead and punched him really hard.”
When the controversial “Elastic Heart” video debuted on Wednesday, critics called the footage, featuring a grown LaBeouf in nude boxers and the much younger Ziegler in a similarly colored bodysuit, pedophilia. The young girl says Sia originally wanted to cast someone who was younger than LaBeouf. “She was like, ‘With this video, I wanna have a guy, I wanna have a boy.’ And, at first, she was like, ‘Maybe we could find a little boy — like, your size,'” relates Ziegler, who also appeared in Sia’s “Chandelier” video. “But then my mom got a call and was like, ‘Oh, Maddie, you’re going to be doing the video with Shia LaBeouf.’ And I was like, ‘Does he dance?’ Actually my first reaction, to be honest, was, ‘Wait, who is he again?'” What do you think of Ziegler’s comments about the video shoot and LaBeouf?
