The story of how grizzled vagabond Shia LaBeouf was arrested by police for showing up wasted to a Broadway production of Cabaret continues to be told, primarily because everyone involved won't stop talking about it. And last night on Conan, it was Cabaret star Alan Cumming's turn.

If you remember, a drunk LaBeouf grabbed Cumming's ass during a part of show where the cast descends on the audience. And you know what? Alan Cumming's cool with it, even though LaBeouf was acting like "a crazy person." "And he did say the reason he did it was that I was the sexiest man he'd ever seen, so," Cumming told Conan.

LaBeouf, in a portentous back-and-forth with film critic Elvis Mitchell in the new issue of Interview magazine, also touched on this famous night of debauchery. He called grabbing Cumming's ass a "mistake":

MITCHELL: Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation. Once somebody enters that space with you, they've got to connect with you. You've broken the fourth wall.

LaBEOUF: And using my persona. Really I'm gaining control over myself again. I've given up so much control over myself to this industry. I felt like a slave who wasn't allowed to read. That's extreme, but it really is that debilitating when you have no say over it anymore. A lot of my actions in the public—and not all of them, because there have been some straight-up mistakes, like grabbing Alan Cumming's ass and getting arrested in New York at Cabaret.

LaBeouf's entire interview in Interview is worth a read, if only for this essential exegesis of metamodernism!

MITCHELL: If we look at these last five movies, including Nymphomaniac, Charlie Countryman [2013], The Company You Keep [2012], Lawless, and now Fury, these guys that you play are all suffering. They are looking for something.

LaBEOUF: I'm going through it myself. I've been going through an existential crisis. If you look at my behavior, it's been motivated by a certain discourse. Metamodernism has influenced a lot of my action in the public in this last year and a half—the idea of diametrically opposed ideas happening all at once: the irony and the sincerity, birth and death, the immediacy and the obsolescence.

MITCHELL: Isn't metamodernism, though, basically saying that irony doesn't mean anything?

LaBEOUF: No, it's definitely not. You have both modernist commitment and postmodern detachment—sincerity with a wink. It is all things. It's a feeling that comes after deconstruction: the ripping apart, or the going to shit of a society, the environmental crisis, the financial crisis, the existential crisis. Metamodernism is the feeling that comes after that.

[H/T THR]