In a recent interview on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, Shia LaBeouf opened up about his struggles with alcoholism. He also revealed how it affected his mental health and how his latest movie helped him to stay sober.
His first came to limelight as a child actor in Even Stevens and then he went on to star in Holes, along with Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voigt.
LaBeouf revisited his unconventional childhood in Honey Boy, a movie based on a child actor and his alcoholic father, which is loosely based on his own experiences. LaBeouf wrote the script after he underwent court-ordered exposure therapy, which had helped him gain some clarity on things that happened to him in his teenage. And that was the time when he was first diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I became addicted to that kudos. It kind of fuelled my way of working for a long time — just pining your own pain, and holding on to it, and not really ever dealing with it or questioning it, but just keeping it in a little bottle that you can pop the top on whenever it’s needed, when the switch needs to be flipped,” said LaBeouf.
Before going to rehab, LaBeouf was allowed to finish the shooting of his movie The Peanut Butter Falcon. He recalled how the cast and crew helped him and it was a real rock bottom moment for him.
“I’m feeling like people on set think I’m a racist, believe I’m a racist, and I’m feeling all of that and don’t want to be alive, basically,” he said.
LaBeouf has credited his co-star Zack Gottsagen, who has Down’s Syndrome, for helping him to stay sober during and after the shooting.
“He (Gottsagen) basically looked me in the eye and said don’t, I’m going to paraphrase, but ‘don’t fuck this up for me, this is my only chance,’” said LaBeouf.
He added, “I had made promises to him and talked to his parents and if you can empathize with that position where you’re looking at somebody you deeply love and had made promises to and know that he’s done everything right and that you have a disease that is going to f**k up everything and that so much is riding on this. I felt all of that.”
Gottsagen had faith in him BUT LaBeouf said he has to struggle to find faith in anything when he was desperately trying to avoid alcohol. He said, “The best I could muster at the time was to look at Google maps of Zack’s address of his house in Florida, and I would pray to the GPS coordinates above Zack’s house, because I knew that Zack believed in God for real, and believed in me. And so I would pray to his God, and that’s what got me through a lot.”
