Shia LaBeouf has revealed that he converted to Catholicism, after studying the religion for his upcoming movie, Padre Pio.
During an interview with Word on Fire Catholic Ministries’ Bishop Robert Barron on Thursday, the 36-year-old actor expressed how much he was mentally struggling and had thoughts of suicide, before joining the cast of his newest movie. However, in order to better understand the late mystic Saint Padre Pio, who he portrays in the biopic, LaBeuof said that he livied with a monastery of Franciscan Capuchin friars and started engaging with the Church, which helped him through the difficult time.
“I had a gun on the table. I was outta here,” he recalled. “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 taco,” he continued. “But I was also in this deep desire to hold on.”
He noted that after reading the gospel with a man named Jude, he joined a few different groups at a church, which helped him become more “drawn into” the religion.
The actor also went on to describe how living with a monastery, for the sake of his role, was ultimately a “reach-out” for him during a dark time and helped him “ draw away from worldly desires”.
“I had nowhere to go. This was the last stop on the train. There was nowhere else to go — in every sense,” he said. “I know now that God was using my ego to draw me to Him. Drawing me away from worldly desires. It was all happening simultaneously. But there would have been no impetus for me to get in my car, drive up [to the monastery] if I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna save my career.’”
However, the Transformers star then acknowledged that he was “tricked” by God in a good way, which he didn’t realise that until some “time had passed”.
“And when I got here, a switch happened,” he recalled. “It was like Three-Card Monte. It was like someone tricked me into it, it felt like. Not in a bad way. In a way that I couldn’t see it. I was so close to it that I couldn’t see it. I see it differently now that time has passed.”
LaBeouf also detailed how he met other people who helped him understand prayer and Christian sin, during a point where he was terrified to be seen in public.
In October 2020, he made headlines after he was charged with misdemeanour battery and petty theft, after verbally and physically fighting with a man named Tyler Murphy in June 2020. The altercation resulted in LaBeouf stealing Murphy’s hat. A few months later, his ex-girlfriend, Singer FKA twigs, filed a lawsuit against him, accusing him of “relentless abuse”.
During his conversation with the Bishop, LaBeouf explained how he felt “hope” in a way that he never had before through his stay at the monastery.
“It was seeing other people who have sinned beyond anything I could ever conceptualise also being found in Christ that made me feel like, ‘Oh, that gives me hope,’” LaBeouf said. “I started hearing experiences of other depraved people who had found their way in this, and it made me feel like I had permission.”
Earlier in the conversation, he also stressed that he wasn’t an expert about the religion at all, as both he and his peers at the monastery were unsure if he was baptised.
“I didn’t know I was baptised,” the Holes star said. I had been baptised earlier in my life and didn’t even remember it. My uncle had baptized me in the [Trinitarian formula]”.
Padre Pio is set to release in the US in September and follows the controversial life of the iconic Italian saint. Pio, who was born Francesco Forgione in 1887, was a renowned Capuchin priest known for portraying stigmata or crucifixion wounds on the body of Jesus Christ. He died in 1968 at the age of 81.
