Shia LaBeouf’s mother has died, the actor revealed.
LaBeouf, 36, said in an emailed interview with The Hollywood Reporter posted Thursday that his mother passed away Aug. 27 at age 80.
The actor was with his mother, Shayna Saide, when she died of heart failure at a Los Angeles hospital, according to the outlet.
While talking about his mother’s legacy, he said she was loved by many and “known by too few.” LaBeouf said Saide was nervous in the hospital, and asked a lot of questions of the doctors.
“She was frantic,” he said. “She was deeply interested in God and spirituality her whole life, but she didn’t know him. Hence her last moments.”
The actor — who previously said in 2014 that he “became a Christian man” during the making of the 2014 war film Fury — has now adopted Catholicism into his life.
“Her greatest gift to me was to promote, in her dying, the necessity of a relationship with God,” he wrote to THR. “Not an interest, not just a belief, but a relationship built on proof as tangible as a hug. Her last gift to me was the ultimate persuasion for faith. She was a good girl.”
LaBeouf, whose mother is Jewish and who previously had a bar mitzvah as well as a baptism, studied Catholicism as he prepared for his upcoming movie, Padre Pio, about the Catholic saint of the same name.
“It was seeing other people who have sinned beyond anything I could ever conceptualize also being found in Christ that made me feel like, ‘Oh, that gives me hope,'” LaBeouf said in a recent conversation with Bishop Robert Barron of the Word on Fire Catholic Ministries about religion. “I started hearing experiences of other depraved people who had found their way — in this — and it made me feel like I had permission.”
On an episode of pal Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast, the actor said the depiction of his father Jeffrey Craig LaBeouf as abusive in his 2019 screenplay debut Honey Boy was “f—ing nonsense” as he opened up about making amends with the people he’s wronged.
“Here’s a man who I’ve done vilified on a grand scale,” LaBeouf said after playing a version of his own dad in the movie, in which the character was named James Lort.
LaBeouf wrote the screenplay for Honey Boy during a previous in-treatment program. The star recently revealed that he’s 627 days sober after seeking treatment again in 2020, following allegations of abuse from his ex FKA Twigs, whom he began dating after starring together in the film.
LaBeouf previously opened up about his parents’ reaction to the film during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Yeah, my mother, my dad, they’ve seen it,” LaBeouf said in 2019. “It was tough for them to watch it. But I think also, they can have distance with it as well. I mean they really, more than they care about this movie s—, they care about their kid, you know?”