Shia LaBeouf won't be making his Broadway debut this season after all. The 26-year-old actor has quit the upcoming revival production of the play "Orphans" in New York over "creative differences," according to a news release sent Wednesday. 
 
 LaBeouf has left the show a month before preview performances are set to begin. "Orphans" is still scheduled to open at the Schoenfeld Theater on April 7, with previews commencing on March 19. The production, directed by Daniel Sullivan, also features Alec Baldwin, in the role of a powerful man kidnapped by two brothers. 
 
 Wednesday's announcement did not elaborate on the nature of the creative differences that led to LaBeouf's departure, and no replacement for the actor has been announced. 
 
 "Orphans," by Lyle Kessler, debuted in 1983 at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles and is often revived at regional theaters across the country. Director Alan Pakula turned it into a movie in 1987, with a cast that included Albert Finney, Matthew Modine and Kevin Anderson. 
 
 In 2005, Al Pacino appeared in a workshop production of the play, alongside Jesse Eisenberg, at the Greenway Court Theatre in L.A. 
 
 LaBeouf rose to fame starring in the "Transformers" action movies and the most recent "Indiana Jones" installment. But the actor made waves earlier this year by saying that he is swearing off Hollywood blockbusters in favor of riskier, indie-flavor projects. 
 
 He had virtually no theater experience going into "Orphans." He began his career doing stand-up comedy, eventually landing a role on the Disney Channel program "Even Stevens." 
 
 His next movies include Robert Redford's "The Company You Keep" and Lars von Trier's "Nymphomaniac." 
 
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 Where's LaBeouf? Shia heading to Broadway, with Alec Baldwin ||||| Tom Hanks swears. Not a blue streak, no, but it’s bracing to hear profanity from the man who has defined decency for three decades in Hollywood, playing white knights in “Splash,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13” and the “Toy Story” series. If he is grandma-friendly on screen, he is looser and less predictable in person — as his old friend Nora Ephron was reminded several years ago when she sent him the screenplay for a biopic, “Lucky Guy.” Mr. Hanks took an instant dislike to his character, Mike McAlary, the muckraking columnist of New York City tabloids in the 1980s and ’90s. 
 
 “I told Nora that McAlary sounded like a real” jerk, Mr. Hanks said, using a more piquant word — and a perceptive one, since McAlary’s power came from his determination to be the biggest, baddest, bona fide ... jerk who ever dug into corrupt cops. 
 
 Mr. Hanks reconsidered only years later, after running into Ephron while promoting his 2011 movie “Larry Crowne.” He was a co-writer, a star and the director of that picture, and it was a critical and commercial disappointment. Ephron, by contrast, represented happier days, during their collaborations on “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” 
 
 They got around to talking about “Lucky Guy” — she had turned it into a play, and Hugh Jackman had done a table reading — and Mr. Hanks asked to see the latest version. This time he felt drawn not only to McAlary’s swagger, but also his drive to become the next Jimmy Breslin and to be worthy of his own celebrity. 
 
 “Look, the title is ‘Lucky Guy.’ It’s about somebody who is almost good enough to deserve what he achieves. And I understand that,” Mr. Hanks said during an interview on the stage of the Broadhurst Theater, where the play, his Broadway debut, is set to begin its 15-week run on Friday. 
 
 “I still feel sometimes that I’d like to be as good as so-and-so actor,” he continued. “I see some other actors’ work, and I think I’ll never get there. I wish I could.” 
 
 Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it. With Academy Awards for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump,” Mr. Hanks is less hesitant. While he denied that, at 56, he is here because his film career has cooled — “I have two movies in the can. I have plenty to keep me busy” — he also appeared delighted that McAlary is pretty far from a predictable Tom Hanks part. 
 
 Will audiences buy him as unlikable? Mr. Hanks is still a genial guy, who tends to cope with pressure by yukking it up. But he has also thrown himself into a role that calls for no vanity, his director and fellow actors say. He has a gray-flecked mustache, as did McAlary, and is trying to preserve the columnist’s rough edges. 
 
 “Anytime you go off to do something new, you’ve involved in a reinvention, and any actor who says otherwise is just trying to lower expectations,” said Mr. Hanks, who trained to be a theater actor in the 1970s but quickly moved on to television and then movies. 
 
 It has been a twisting path to Broadway for Mr. Hanks and “Lucky Guy,” and a heartbreaking one. The sharp-elbowed McAlary, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his columns about the brutalization of Abner Louima by police officers, died later that year from colon cancer, at the age of 41. Soon after, Ephron, a former reporter for The New York Post who cherished the tabloids of yesteryear, began to research McAlary’s life and spent years rewriting the script, at one point calling it “Stories About McAlary.” 
 
 Once Mr. Hanks signed on, Ephron began meeting weekly with the play’s director, the Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America”), to sharpen the central device — other journalists sharing and arguing over anecdotes about McAlary — so that the lead character came into sharper focus. All the while, however, Ephron was quietly battling leukemia; to the shock of her “Lucky Guy” collaborators and many friends, she died last June, at 71. 
 
 “Nora was turning around new drafts of the play in a week, and it was confusing to me why she was working so quickly,” Mr. Wolfe said. “I had no awareness of the invisible timetable she was on. After she died, we were even more determined to do the play.” 
 
 Writers are a pretty hands-on lot, especially with new works going to Broadway. Without Ephron, Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Hanks have become keepers of the “Lucky Guy” flame. Aside from Ephron’s script, there are pages of discarded dialogue that Mr. Wolfe has cherry-picked for an extra dash of nuance or sprinkle of clarity. “My motto is, ‘When in doubt, reference Nora,’ ” Mr. Wolfe said, and he has done so with the blessing of her widower, the writer Nicholas Pileggi. 
 
 Mr. Hanks, meanwhile, read many of McAlary’s columns and interviewed some of his old friends, coming away agreeing with a point Ephron once made about him. “Nora said Mac was good when he was covering the stuff he knew, cops and cop scandals, while other times he was clearly struggling,” he recalled. 
 
 Seeing those imperfections has helped him avoid turning McAlary into a classically uplifting Hanks role. Or, as he put it bluntly: “not to” screw “this up.”
– Shia LaBeouf was set to make his Broadway debut in Orphans, but the actor has walked away from the production less than a month before previews were set to begin. The initial news release cited only "creative differences" for LaBeouf's departure, the Los Angeles Times reported. But LaBeouf quickly took to Twitter last night, posting details involving a disagreement with Alec Baldwin, who also stars in the play. In an email to Baldwin that LaBeouf posted, LaBeouf mentions "bickering" and "a disagreeable situation," but a source tells the New York Post that the actor is just using his incompatibility with Baldwin as an excuse. The truth is LaBeouf "was fired because he wasn’t good in the role," the source says. As of now, the play is still set to open April 7. In happier theater news, Tom Hanks makes his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy, a play written by Nora Ephron, next week, the New York Times reports.