Actor Shia LaBeouf said he converted to Christianity while shooting his upcoming motion picture “Padre Pio” and has get a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

LaBeouf revealed his conversion in an interview released Th with Discussion on Fire Catholic Ministries’ Bishop Robert Barron.

The actor first engaged with the church while living with a monastery of Franciscan Capuchin friars in order to better sympathize the belatedly mystic St. Padre Pio, whom LaBeouf portrays in the upcoming moving picture.

Heading into the project, LaBeouf said that he was at the darkest point in his life after a series of public scandals. He was drawn to spirituality and joined a variety of faith groups to find meaning, fighting thoughts of helplessness and suicide.

“I had a gun on the table. I was outta here,” Shia recalled in the nearly 90-minute interview. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore when all this happened. Shame like I had never experienced earlier — the kind of shame that you forget how to breathe. You don’t know where to go. Yous can’t get outside and get like, a taco.”

“Merely I was as well in this deep desire to hold on,” he added.

The actor described finding faith during his inquiry by surprise, saying that his mindset going into the movie was focused on his career, not God.

“The reach-out had happened. I was already there, I had nowhere to go. This was the last end on the railroad train. There was nowhere else to go — in every sense,” LaBeouf said in the interview.

He continued, “I know at present that God was using my ego to draw me to Him. Drawing me abroad from worldly desires. It was all happening simultaneously. But at that place would accept been no impetus for me to become in my car, drive up [to the monastery] if I didn’t call back, ‘Oh, I’thousand gonna save my career.’”

While researching and performing the role, however, LaBeouf said he felt “tricked” by God.

“And when I got here, a switch happened. Information technology was like Three-Card Monte. Information technology was similar someone tricked me into it, it felt like,” the actor recounted. “Not in a bad style. In a way that I couldn’t see it. I was so close to information technology that I couldn’t run across information technology. I see information technology differently now that time has passed.”

LaBeouf described talking through his feelings and learning about the Christian understanding of sin and forgiveness as primal to pulling him out of a nighttime fourth dimension in his life.

The actor said that he did not feel worthy of pursuing piety of any kind until he met others who had struggled morally in ways he’d never seen earlier and felt safe.

Last year, LaBeouf was charged with ii misdemeanors — trivial theft and battery — afterward he stole a homo’s hat in a fight that turned concrete. Just a couple of months afterward, his ex-girlfriend and pop star FKA Twigs sued him over his declared calumniating beliefs.

Another ex-girlfriend was listed in the lawsuit and too claimed LaBeouf was abusive toward her.

“Information technology was seeing other people who have sinned beyond annihilation I could ever anticipate also being found in Christ that fabricated me feel similar, ‘Oh, that gives me promise,’” LaBeouf told the bishop. “I started hearing experiences of other depraved people who had constitute their way in this, and it fabricated me feel like I had permission.”

Actor Shia LaBeouf — The actor was fighting thoughts of helplessness and suicide.

LaBeouf plays the titular character in “Padre Pio,” a film helmed by Abel Ferrara exploring the life of the Franciscan Capuchin mystic.

Padre Pio was born Francesco Forgione in southern Italy in 1887. He became famous for showing stigmata, or crucifixion wounds like those on the body of Jesus Christ. He died in 1968 at the age of 81, was beatified by Pope John Paul Ii in 1999 and so canonized in 2002. Ferrara previously made a short documentary on the religious figure.

Despite intense scrutiny from skeptics and members of the medical community, no conclusive explanation has been given for Pio’southward stigmata, which allegedly appeared and healed throughout his life.

LaBeouf felt immense pressure as he learned more about Pio and spoke to other Franciscan Capuchin friars, who he says begged him, “Don’t get information technology wrong. He’due south the only 1 we take.”

The actor stressed throughout the interview that despite his intense immersion, he is still very new to the faith and not an expert on unlike aspects of the organized religion. When his conversion started, LaBeouf and the friars were not even sure if he had e’er been baptized.

“I didn’t know I was baptized. I had been baptized earlier in my life and didn’t fifty-fifty remember it. My uncle had baptized me in the [Trinitarian formula],” he explained.

LaBeouf told Barron that the traditional form of the Catholic mass — celebrated in Latin — was key in both his conversion and his performance as an histrion playing Pio.

When Ferrara asked LaBeouf to utilize an Italian accent while acting, he refused. The movie had become too personal and too important to wear a “mask” equally LaBeouf described it to Barron.

“While we were practicing Latin Mass, I was having genuine emotional experiences, and bated from the fact that as a Neapolitan speaker, [Pio’s] emphasis wouldn’t have matched Italian anyway, but it felt like that would have taken me out of this thing that felt very personal,” LaBeouf explained.

Barron, of the Dioceses of Winona-Rochester, 62, is the most widely-followed online Cosmic cleric in the country, aside Pope Francis himself.

“It was a please to sit downward for an in-depth conversation with Shia LaBeouf, 1 of the well-nigh compelling actors of his generation,” Barron said of his fourth dimension with LaBeouf. “Shia is as well a homo with a fascinating story to tell regarding his spiritual journeying. I think that anyone who is struggling to find the way to God will be interested in what he has to say.”

While his episcopal function concerns his parishes in Minnesota — where he is already widely known — Barron’s public influence stretches around the world via his books, videos, radio shows and documentaries with his Word on Burn ministries.

Fox News reached out to LaBeouf’s management and PR representatives only did not receive a response.