Shia LaBeouf is on a bit of an apology tour these days. After a momentous few years of making regular headlines, he faced serious allegations of abuse from his ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs. Now he’s trying to make up or at least share his side of the story. Oh, but about that, it turns out that his past attempts at telling his side of the story weren’t exactly true.
LaBeouf had claimed to be playing his own father, Jeffrey Craig LaBeouf, in the semi-autobiographical movie Honey Boy. But it turns out that movie was heavier on the “semi” than we thought, because he now admits his portrayal of his father as an abusive monster was “f***ing nonsense.”
“Here’s a man who I’ve done vilified on a grand scale,” the actor says (per The Independent). “I wrote this narrative, which was just f***i g nonsense. My dad was so loving to me my whole life. Fractured, sure. Crooked, sure. Wonky, for sure. But never was not loving, never was not there. He was always there… and I’d done a world press tour about how f***ed he was as a man.”
LaBeouf said all this on fellow actor Jon Bernthal’s podcast. It’s one thing to lie to an audience about what kind of man your father was, but LaBeouf also says he lied to his dad — omitting the abusive elements of the story from a draft of the script he sent his father’s way to secure a blessing. That’s pretty messed up.
“My dad never hit me, never,” LaBeouf said. “He spanked me once, one time. And the story that gets painted in Honey Boy is this dude is abusing his kid all the time.”
There’s certainly something to be said about coming clean on all of this, which is about all anyone can do after telling lies of this magnitude. LaBeouf sought forgiveness from his father, and that’s definitely the bare minimum. “When I got on the phone with him, I took accountability for all of that and knew very clearly that I couldn’t take it back, and my dad was gonna live with this certain narrative about him on a public scale for a very long time, probably the rest of his life.”
We don’t know whether or not LaBeouf has sought forgiveness from other people he’s hurt. He has admitted to being “disgusting” and “depraved” in his past actions, but has “generally and specifically” denied Twigs’ allegations in court.
