"Had a gun on the table": 'Transformers' star Shia LaBeouf opens up about contemplating suicide
Aug 26, 2022
Washington [US], August 26 : Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf of 'Transformers' fame has stated that he contemplated suicide during his career's low point following a slew of public scandals, including the one when his ex-girlfriend and singer FKA twigs accused him of sexual battery and assault.
According to Deadline, the actor was also involved in car crashes, court-ordered rehab and emotional outbursts among other things.
LaBeouf has since admitted in a YouTube interview with Word on Fire Catholic Ministries' Bishop Robert Barron that he felt a need for friction and conflict to drive his performances. It also nearly drove him out of the industry.
"At this point I'm nuclear. Nobody wants to talk to me, including my mother. My manager's not calling. The agent's not calling. I'm not connected to the business anymore," LaBeouf remembered about that time in the interview.
The actor intimated, that he was ready to commit suicide. "I had a gun on the table. I was outta here. I didn't want to be alive anymore when all this happened. Shame like I had never experienced before, the kind of shame that you forget how to breathe. You don't know where to go. You can't go outside and get like a, a taco."
Among the long list of life lessons that LaBeouf learned was his dismissal from Olivia Wilde's film 'Don't Worry Darling'. Wilde spoke about the decision for the first time in an interview this week with Variety.
She said, "I say this as someone who is such an admirer of his work. His process was not conducive to the ethos that I demand in my productions. He has a process that, in some ways, seems to require a combative energy, and I don't personally believe that is conducive to the best performances."
In his YouTube interview, LaBeouf said that his life had been saved, that he had gotten to the other side of that dark period as a result of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, which itself was prompted by research to play the titular character in Abel Ferrera's upcoming film about the controversial 20th-Century monk, 'Padre Pio'.
The actor revealed the genesis of the project was meeting Ferrara in a Zoom meeting for a "spiritual program" to which they both ascribe. LaBeouf says the result is he's been able to see that "my life had led to serious infliction of pain and damage on other people."
Reffering to FKA twigs as "the woman who accused me of all this" he said that "I wanted to go on Twitter and write all these things...I wanted to justify all this and explain. Now I see that...The woman saved my life. She was, for me, a saint in my life. She saved my life," as per Deadline.