It’s been a long time coming.
Even actors who have nice things to say about Shia LaBeouf concede that the erratic, hobo-chasing actor may have snapped after years of carrying the burden of being a child star.
“I think there’s a ton of pressure when you’re in the acting business,” said Siobhan Fallon Hogan, who co-starred with LaBeouf in one of his earliest flicks, the 2003 Disney film “Holes.”
“It’s hard growing up acting — being a child actor. There’s pressure to act the right way,” Hogan told The Post.
“And there’s so much attention from the press that, if you make one wrong move, it’s under a microscope. I can see that being hard for him.”
The oddball actor was caught on video Thursday hounding a homeless man through Times Square, and was later busted that night at Studio 54 for disrupting a performance of “Cabaret.”
Even though he has been known for bad behavior for years, friends and colleagues speculated that things got worse since his firing from Broadway’s “Orphans.”
Producers cited “creative differences,” but the rude heave-ho marked the first time that even fellow actors called out LaBeouf’s lack of professionalism.
“He had that card, that card you get when you make films that make a lot of money that gives you a certain kind of entitlement,” Alec Baldwin opined at the time. “I think he was surprised it didn’t work in the theater.”
Though LaBeouf now risks losing the respect of fans and professionals in the industry, he still has his supporters.
Before Thursday’s meltdown, those close to LaBeouf claimed his strange behavior was just an act — a Joaquin Phoenix-like performance.
“Everyone who knows Shia is in on the joke,” a Hollywood insider told Page Six earlier this year.
Thursday’s arrest is just the latest incident in a string of erratic episodes.
He recently attended the Berlin Film Festival with a paper bag over his head inscribed: “I am not famous anymore.”
He also tweeted that he was “retiring from public life because of attacks against his artistic integrity.”
And last year, after he got bounced from “Orphans,” he shared several confrontational e-mails between himself and co-stars Baldwin and Tom Sturridge.
Additional reporting by David K. Li and Post Wire Services