All About Shia LaBeouf's Parents, Jeffrey LaBeouf and Shayna Saide

Shia LaBeouf’s life felt like a movie long before his time on the screen, thanks to his eccentric parents Jeffrey LaBeouf and Shayna Saide.

The actor first got a taste for performing from his parents, who dressed up the entire family to sell food in the Los Angeles neighborhood Shia grew up in. The Peanut Butter Falcon star has shared that Jeffrey and Shayna fought often and rarely got along unless they were performing.

“They loved each other the most when they were creating together,” he told Esquire in a 2018 profile. “When they stopped creating, s--- fell apart.”

Jeffrey and Shayna separated when he was 3, and Shia’s relationship with his father ebbed and flowed throughout the years as he lived with his mom. The two remained closed up until her death from heart failure in 2022.

While he has referred to Shayna as his “everything,” Shia has had a complicated relationship with his dad, further intensified by his portrayal of Jeffrey in his semi-autobiographical 2019 movie Honey Boy. However, Jeffrey has said he still has full faith in his son — and might be able to sum up the controversial actor better than most.

“I’m proud of my son,” Jeffrey said in a wide-ranging 2019 interview with GEN on Medium. “Shia can be a badass. He has that ability. But he is the sweetest, kindest soul. He’s a wonderful person who went through some s---.”

Here’s everything to know about Shia LaBeouf’s parents, Jeffrey LaBeouf and Shayna Saide.

They met in Los Angeles

Jeffrey and Shayna met at an artist market in the L.A. neighborhood of Echo Park when she was in town selling her work. Jeffrey was working as a clown and karate instructor when the two crossed paths and quickly hit it off, according to Esquire. The two later welcomed Shia, their only child, in 1986.

The Transformers star has recounted how his parents fought often and had trouble staying financially stable while raising him in Echo Park. Shayna and Jeffrey's alternative lifestyle is still memorable for Shia.

“I come from hippies,” he told Parade in 2009, describing his dad as a “wandering dude” recovering from his time in the Vietnam War and his mom as an eccentric artist whose “furniture hung upside-down from the ceiling.”

Jeffrey and Shayna performed together before their split

To pay the bills, the family would all dress up “in full clown regalia,” Shia recalled to Parade, and sell hot dogs in the streets.

“My embarrassment factor didn’t exist. I had fun, because I knew that in the middle of a performance my parents couldn’t fight,” the Emmy winner told Parade. “So, for sure, every day, there had to be some peaceful time for us, or we weren’t going to make it through the week financially.”

Their creative bond couldn't keep Jeffrey and Shayna together, though, and the two split up when Shia was 3 years old.

Shia was by Shayna’s side when she died in 2022

Shia announced in 2022 that his mother had died in August of that year of heart failure. She was 80 years old, and he was with her in the hospital until the end.

Her last moments were frantic, Shia recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter months after her death, as she struggled with the fact that she was “deeply interested in God and spirituality her whole life, but she didn’t know him.”

Witnessing this led to Shia becoming more involved in religion. “Her greatest gift to me was to promote, in her dying, the necessity of a relationship with God ... Her last gift to me was the ultimate persuasion for faith,” he said.

“She was a good girl. She was loved by many and known by too few. God bless you, Momma,” he added.

Jeffrey is a Vietnam veteran

Jeffrey was born and raised in San Francisco and often performed as a clown to support himself. Before having Shia, Jeffrey was a soldier in the Vietnam War and struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction when he returned home, per Esquire.

“The worst, very worst experience was not in combat. It was at Cam Ranh Bay Airport, loading GIs in plastic bags onto planes to come back to the States,” he told GEN. “That was a trauma that I’ve carried with me for my life. I struggle with whether the war was a good thing."

Shia shares his artistic side with Shayna

Shayna was an artist born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to two parents with rich history and culture, according to her biography on her now-defunct art website, Shayna’s World. She initially made a career in modern and jazz dance, touring in the United States and Europe.

In her later years, she settled in the Angeles Crest Foothills and began spending time in silence in her studio, where she “became fully absorbed in a boundless explorative dialogue with the mystery of the universe."

Shia likely gets his passion for performance art from Shayna, having taken part in several projects that explore culture and, specifically, his fame. He’s had several noteworthy art installations and headline-making moments with frequent collaborators Rönkkö and Turner.

These include a 24-hour livestream in response to the Trump presidency, a livestream of Shia binging all of his movies in 2016 and the actor attending the premiere of the film Nymphomaniac in 2014 wearing a paper bag painted with the phrase “I am not famous anymore” over his head.

Shia portrayed his father in his 2019 movie Honey Boy

Like Jeffrey, Shia has struggled with alcoholism and has attended rehab several times in the last few years. During one of his stays, Shia wrote the script for his 2019 semi-autobiographical movie Honey Boy in which he cast himself as his father. The movie portrayed Jeffrey as an alcoholic and abusive stage father to his child actor son.

Yet, in 2022, Shia admitted that the depiction of his father as abusive was "f------ nonsense” on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast. He also opened up about making amends with the people he's wronged.

"My dad never hit me, never," Shia 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."

The actor added, “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 f----- he was as a man."

While Jeffrey didn’t outright condemn his portrayal in Honey Boy at the time, he did tell GEN that “some of my actions in the film didn’t seem like they were my actions,” but that he respected Shia’s interpretation of events.

“I had to realize that his pain and how he visualized it came from a child — that pain came to him and he carried it with him, and somehow he pointed it at me,” Jeffrey said. “That’s painful for anybody, but because I wanted to continue my relationship with … this person who is so dear to me, I was willing to face my s--- as much as he was willing to face his.”