As you may know, the filmmaker wrote the screenplay for his quasi-autobiographical 2019 project, which was inspired by his complicated relationship with his father, Jeffrey LaBeouf. Shia actually played a version of his dad in the movie, a character named James Lort — a former rodeo clown and abusive alcoholic. But it turns out the Transformers star took some creative liberties when it came to how his father was depicted in the movie…

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During an interview with host Jon Bernthal on the Real Ones podcast, the 36-year-old actor spilled that the portrayal of his father as abusive in the film was “f**king nonsense.” Whoa! He expressed regret over how he “wrong” Jeffrey with the movie, stating:

“Here’s a man who I’ve done vilified on a grand scale. I wrote this narrative, which was just f**king 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**ked he was as a man.”

Shia continued:

“Honey Boy is basically a big ‘woe is me’ story about how f**ked my father is, and I wronged him. I remember getting on the phone with him, and him being like, ‘I never read this stuff in the script you sent.’ Because I didn’t put that s**t in there.”

The Even Stevens alum explained that he was “bulls**tting” his father to receive permission to make the film by “just trying to get him to sign this piece of paper” before confessing:

“I turned the knob up on certain s**t that wasn’t real. 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.”

He claimed the only time Jeffrey ever spanked him was when he was caught smoking as a child. Shia went on to say:

“But that wasn’t my narrative, because it didn’t position me as this wounded, fractured child that you could root for, which is what I was using him for. So, 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.”

Wow…

What are your thoughts on Shia’s confession, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments (below).

[Image via Amazon Studios/YouTube, WENN/Avalon]