Shia LaBeouf sat down for an interview recently with Interview Magazine to talk about his career, his heroes, and Fury, his latest film which also stars Brad Pitt. In it, LaBeouf says he learned a lot from veteran actor Gary Oldman while working on Man Down, but when the two first met on the set of Lawless, he was worried he would scare Oldman off.

“He worked on Lawless for a few days and we really bonded. It was like meeting Superman. And he knew how much I looked up to him. I’m pretty blunt about it. In those three days, he couldn’t get away from me. I thought, “This man will never want to work with me again. I’ve bombarded him.” But then this Man Down thing came up and he was really into it,” he said.

LaBeouf talked about looking up to Oldman and called him an “immersive actor”, saying he puts everything into his roles.

“Everything that he’s in, he’s committed, totally. That’s the beauty of Gary,” he said.

LaBeouf has taken some criticism recently for other comments he made in the same interview about finding God while working on Fury, although some say his words should be taken with a grain of salt.

“I found God doing Fury. I became a Christian man, and not in a fucking bullshit way—in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page. But it was a real thing that really saved me. And you can’t identify unless you’re really going through it. It’s a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control. And while there’s beauty to that, acting is all about control. So that was a wild thing to navigate,” he said.

World Magazine‘s Megan Basham says she doesn’t think the actor–who was raised in the Jewish faith–was talking about more than his career with the comments.

“Rather than making a personal declaration of his devotion to Christ, the actor could have been merely commenting on his immersive style of acting. I certainly hope I am wrong in my reading of LaBeouf’s comments, and there seems little doubt from the interview that he does have an interest in the answers Christ provides to life’s greatest questions,” she wrote.