Actor Shia LaBeouf has been lighting up headlines this week. While he bravely admitted his bout with suicidal thoughts, his battles with director Olivia Wilde on Don’t Worry, Darling have taken the lead. Now, LaBeouf is admitting that the so-called autobiographical Honey Boy was anything but. LaBeouf fessed up on his friend and The Peanut Butter Falcon co-star Jon Bernthal’s podcast, Real Ones.
In the interview, LaBeouf reflected on Honey Boy: “I wrote this narrative, which was just fucking 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 fucked he was as a man.”
Upon release and on the promotional circuit, Honey Boy–which Shia LaBeouf wrote–the actor consistently noted the autobiographical elements and how the supposed strained relationship with his father molded it. “Prior to this my father and me hadn’t spoken in six, seven years. We are talking now…I talked to him before I came in here.” This clearly contradicts his statements from this week.
Shia LaBeouf, who played a variation of his father in Honey Boy and earned some of his career-best reviews, continued. “My dad never hit me, never. 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.”
Even the official plot synopsis noted it was “a one-of-a-kind collaboration between filmmaker and subject, exploring art as medicine and imagination as hope through the life and times of a talented, traumatized performer who dares to go in search of himself.”
What are your thoughts on Shia LaBeouf’s admissions? Do you think it detracts from Honey Boy at all?
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