Jail time snapped him out of it! Shia LaBeouf sat down with Ellen DeGeneres on Friday, Oct. 10, where he addressed his eventful past year, which came to a head when he was arrested this past June.
"You've had quite an interesting life in the last year or so," DeGeneres remarked to LaBeouf. "So uhhhh what happened?"
Laughing, the 28-year-old actor acknowledged his increasingly erratic and troublesome behavior. "I went through this existential crisis," he said. "Which turned into like, explorations. I had some hiccups, some judgment errors."
DeGeneres recalled when LaBeouf attended the premiere of his movie, Nymphomaniac, back in February, with a brown paper bag over his head, which read: "I am not famous anymore." After his outlandish red carpet statement, LaBeouf apologized with his #IAMSORRY performance art piece. "You did a performance piece where people could come and see you and say whatever they wanted to you," DeGeneres noted of his antics.
He responded, "Yeah. We had a table with all these instruments. You know there was like an Indiana Jones whip and some pliers… There was a lot of negativity online. So I thought, 'Alright, let's see what all this negativity is about. Let's invite it in.'"
According to LaBeouf, the experience was surprising, especially for him. "I figured maybe someone will pull my fingernails off," he confessed. "We had these one-on-one situations where we'd invite one person at a time and they can do whatever they wanted… I was sitting in there broken. I was really truly apologetic." Instead, LaBeouf described his encounters with each person as "very loving."
His most recent public meltdown took place in June, when he was arrested in NYC for disturbing a performance of Michelle Williams and Alan Cumming's Broadway show Cabaret. LaBeouf's rep later told Us Weekly that the star was seeking treatment for alcoholism.
"Jail was quite scary," LaBeouf admitted. "I was there for, it felt like forever, I think 24 hours, 25 hours… I really went all the way with it, they put a Hannibal mask on me and a led jacket. It was very scary." Find out more details about Shia's experience in jail.
The Fury star said that being behind bars, along with heeding the advice of his mother Shayna Saide, helped him move past his "existential crisis." Saide told her famous son to "stop f—king around," LaBeouf recalled. "It's been a process, you know? I am quite stubborn as an only child. It's just me and her. She was mom and dad… Now I'm on the right path."
Watch him gush about his mother above!
