Shia LaBeouf Calls ‘Honey Boy’ A ‘Love Letter’ To His Once Estranged Father

Shia LaBeouf doesn’t shrink back from private trauma in “Honey Boy,” the semi-autobiographical movie that additionally marks his screenwriting debut. 

In a Tuesday look on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” LaBeouf talked about writing a lot of “Honey Boy” throughout a stint at a rehab facility he referred to as “head camp” after his 2017 arrest in Georgia on fees that included disorderly conduct. Previous to finishing the script, the actor hadn’t spoken to his father, Jeffrey, in seven years. 

“Head camp is the place the courtroom sends you when the opposite choice is seven years in jail, just about,” LaBeouf defined. “They mentioned, ‘You’ve acquired PTSD, we’ve acquired an answer.’ We began doing these things referred to as publicity remedy. By way of that strategy of recording all these conversations is the place the film got here from.”

“Honey Boy” stars LaBeouf as an alcoholic and abusive father to a younger actor, Otis Lort, performed by Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges at totally different levels within the character’s life. The movie has been described as “an egoless retelling” of LaBeouf’s early years as a baby actor on the Disney Channel sequence “Even Stevens,” with the film’s title coming from his personal real-life nickname. 

LaBeouf reunited along with his father on the urging of “Honey Boy” director Alma Har’el. Later, he watched his dad watch the movie in its entirety through an online digital camera. Seems, the elder LaBeouf was impressed. 

“He didn’t say a lot however he felt like I noticed him, like I noticed him,” the actor mentioned. “I acquired him. He was very teary-eyed. It’s a love letter.”

“Honey Boy,” which hits theaters Friday, has earned near-universal praise from critics. Refinery 29 called the film “an indictment of poisonous masculinity by a lady’s gaze and a tough have a look at the methods Hollywood fails its little one actors,” whereas The Guardian applauded LaBeouf’s “clear-eyed” script. 

On Sunday, LaBeouf obtained a screenwriting award for the movie on the 2019 Hollywood Movie Awards, the place he thanked the Georgia police officer who arrested him for “altering my life.”