U OUGHT TO KNOW.

Byline: - Valerie Kuklenski

Name: Shia LeBeouf

Age: 16

Profession: Actor

Why U ought to know him: LeBeouf's an up-and-comer groomed, like Amanda Bynes and Hilary Duff, in kid-friendly television and now ready for his close-up on the big screen. He studied at the Magnet School for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles and earned his diploma early, leaving him plenty of time to work before college. This Tujunga resident's mom and dad are the antithesis of pushy stage parents, making his success - one series and a few TV movies leading to four features hitting theaters within five months - all the more remarkable. By the end of the summer, we could ask, ``Who doesn't know him?''

Where U've seen him before: LeBeouf is up for a Daytime Emmy Award for playing Louis Stevens in the Disney Channel series ``Even Stevens,'' which continues in reruns. His TV movies include ``Hounded,'' ``Breakfast With Einstein'' and ``Tru Confessions,'' in which he played a teen with cerebral palsy. In his debut feature, ``Holes,'' he plays Stanley Yelnats IV, who finds himself in a juvenile detention camp where the warden (Sigourney Weaver) and her assistants, Mr. Sir (Jon Voight) and Mr. Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson), order the inmates to dig large holes as a character-building exercise. The young charges learn that what they really are doing is putting their backs into a dig for Old West artifacts that will profit their captors.

On working with Jon Voight: ``You kind of have to take what he gives you and filter it and make it realistic to your life, because I don't know how I'm going to do what he asks me to do. It's sort of like when you're talking to the wise owl. Only half of it makes sense, and you've got to decipher the rest. That's what talking to Jon Voight's like.''

Supporting player or leading man? ``I prefer to take the starring role any day, because those seem to be the better roles nowadays, especially for my age range, because people are always writing dumb for 16-year-olds - and 16-year-olds are not dumb at all.''

Except for in ``Dumb and Dumberer'': LeBeouf plays Lewis, a special-ed classmate of the characters created by Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in the new comedy prequel ``When Harry Met Lloyd: Dumb and Dumberer.'' ``That's one of those movies that you just sign up for because it's like going to summer camp. It was just, 'How wild can we get with this? How can we make this funny?' ''

And then there's ``Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'': ``That was kind of fun, too, 'cause I'm working with the most beautiful women in Hollywood (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu), and you get to look at them all day, and when you get bored with them, you get to hang with Bernie Mac (Bosley), who makes me laugh on a dime.''

Just a kid at heart: ``It's a hard world only because you're having to deal with all these adults around you, and mistakes aren't supposed to happen on a film set. This is a time when you're supposed to make mistakes, and I'm in an industry where you can't make mistakes. It's kind of an oxymoron, but I'm finding a way to make it work.''

Where U can see him: ``Holes'' opens Friday; ``When Harry Met Lloyd: Dumb and Dumberer'' is due June 13; ``Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' opens June 27; and ``The Battle of Shaker Heights,'' the latest in Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Project Greenlight series, premieres as the HBO making-of-series on June 22 and in theaters Aug. 15.

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Photo:

no caption (SHIA LEBEOUF)