Shia LaBeouf Admits He Made Up ‘Honey Boy’ Abuse, Says He “Wronged” His Dad

Shia LaBeouf broke his silence last week when he denied being fired from Don’t Worry Darling, and now the actor is dropping another bombshell, alleging his film Honey Boy was not as autobiographical as he we were told. LaBeouf, who penned Honey Boy and starred in the 2019 drama about his childhood, now says he made up the parts about his abusive father.

During an Aug. 26 appearance on Jon Bernthal‘s Real Ones podcast, LaBeouf called his own screenplay “fucking nonsense,” explaining, “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 fucked he was as a man,” per IndieWire.

Honey Boy tells the story of LaBeouf’s relationship with his father, whom he portrays in the film, and the start of his career as a child actor. While the movie depicts an abusive relationship, LaBeouf told Bernthal the reality was quite different.

“I turned the knob up on certain shit that wasn’t real. My dad never hit me, never,” he said. “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.”

LaBeouf also said he misrepresented the film script to his father in order to create it, and said seeing the finished product was a shock to his father.

“Honey Boy is basically a big ‘woe is me’ story about how fucked my father is, and I wronged him,” the actor said. “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 shit in there.”

LaBeouf appears to be trying to clear his name in recent weeks, after he publicly contested Olivia Wilde‘s claims that she fired him from her film, Don’t Worry Darling, in part to keep her actors safe. LaBeouf claimed he left the production over rehearsal conflicts and asked Wilde to “correct the narrative.”