Shia LaBeouf is Proud of Growing up Poor
Posted by Adam
Shia LaBeouf isn’t embarrassed that he grew up poor.
The Transformers star, 23, insists he’s “proud’ of his humble roots.
“My dad and my mom were both artists who never found an audience for their artwork,” LaBeouf tells Parade magazine. “And so I lived in poverty. Now that I’m not poor, I know that is what it was. Like Hemingway said, you can’t write anything if you’ve never been shot at or been gorged by a bull, you know? So I look back at that stuff and I’m grateful. It’s like scars. You become proud of them.”
“My dad was a Vietnam vet,” the actor adds. “He was in Vietnam long enough to come back and be a disaster. My dad brought something called the ‘elephant seed’ to Oahu, Hawaii. And in Oahu, it became the ‘Thai’ stick. But how do you make millions on weed when you don’t own a plant? Nobody owns a plant. Well, my dad wasn’t thinking franchise. He was selling things to the Hawaiian mafia, and then they would give it to their cab drivers to sell when they picked people up from airports.”
Shia also revealed why he decided to embark on a career in showbiz. “I just knew that money was a solution to whatever the hell was going on in my household. With money, I and my family would have had more options. So I went after a job that I thought I could make the most money for a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old boy.”
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