Indiana Jones 5: the fate of Mutt and Shia LaBeouf explained by the director

In The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy discovered a son… This is what happened.

It is with Helena, his goddaughter played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge that the famous archaeologist shares his new adventures in Indiana Jones 5. But 15 years ago, in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy discovered a son. So what happened to little Mutt Williams played by Shia Labeouf ? Spoiler alert!

The Dial of Destiny gives a specific answer that justifies his absence: Mutt was killed in the Vietnam War, and mourning broke up Indy’s marriage to his beloved Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). So much so that the adventurer no longer wants to return home. “It felt right emotionally to me that this disillusioned hero could find himself in the heart of history and not want to get out, after losing his wife and son…“, entrusts James Mangold in Variety, before clarifying that the decision to kill Mutt is not directly linked to the discrepancies in Shia Labeoufwho publicly rotted The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull some time after its release, then Steven Spielberg himself: “It’s less a director than a fucking company“said the actor bluntly in 2016.

“Our script decision is separate from the past, political intrigue and all that stuff around films that I didn’t even direct. Either we made a movie about the two of them, about Indy and Mutt, or we had to find a way to not have Mutt anymore… Because his role is too important in the previous film to pretend that he does not exist. Above all, James Mangold believes that the dynamic between father and son was not very successful:

“I think it didn’t work very well in the previous film. So I just went for something else because it was more interesting in my opinion.”

The filmmaker preferred to explore what it meant for Indy to look back, to have a life of regrets, and to be ready to disappear into history, literally. “We could have made him stay in Sicily, see him heal his traumas, remarry, open a small shop, find a beautiful Sicilian house where to end his days… We could have done that but I didn’t see it like that. I think it was important for Indy to come home, clean up his life and finally admit what had happened to him and Marion and his inability to deal with this grieving situation with her.”

The Dial of Destiny is currently in theaters in France.