'The Interview': Sean Penn Let Himself Get Away With Things for 15 Years. Not Anymore.

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From the New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm David Marchese.

Sean Penn's new movie, One Battle After Another, is tough to pin down.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tiana Taylor, It's about radicals on the run in an America that looks very much like our own.

The movie is politically charged, and it's also spiked with moments of weird humor, anger, and a lot of heart.

I think it's going to cause all sorts of reactions.

Which makes it a perfect fit for Sean Penn, because the actor is also, in his own way, a kind of provocateur.

He's always willing to stir up strong feelings and make things happen.

He does that in his acting, of course.

He's won Academy Awards for his work in Mystic River and Milk.

He does it in his occasional, somewhat gonzo journalism.

And he's also done it as an outspoken advocate for his liberal political views.

That swaggering approach to life has caused more than its share of skeptical eye rolls in his direction, but it is hard to doubt Penn's commitment to world affairs.

The best proof of that is his long-running humanitarian aid group called CORE, which lends on-the-ground help in places like Haiti, Sudan, and even here in the United States.

I spoke with Penn a few weeks ago at his home in Malibu.

We talked in a room surrounded by personal memorabilia, ranging from photos of family and his famous friends to an impressive and frankly daunting collection of knives.

His big dog wandered in and out of the room, and the smoke from his cigarettes lingered in the air.

He was, I gotta say, exactly what I'd been hoping for: sincere, funny, a little crotchety, self-aware about his own grandiosity, and as always, unafraid to let it fly.

Here's my conversation with Sean Penn.

So we're ready to go.

Are you ready?

Sure.

And do I need to give a spiel beforehand?

You know basically what we're doing here, right?

Let's find out as we go.

So can you just explain to the audience where we're doing this interview?

I would call this your man cave or the the John Penn version of Elvis' jungle room.

HQ.

HQ.

When I'm not on my feet, I'm in this room.

When my girlfriend is not in town, I sleep in this room.

It's the room in my house where I feel most comfortable, but it is also a room in process of curation.

All of my personal and family stuff, there's some in here.

And I am not 45, I'm 65,

and I can forget things that are impossible to forget.

And I look around the room and I go, I knew that guy,

or I was in that place at that time.

So it's a room that in its own way, it's like if someone had a lot of post-its to remind them where they put their keys, which makes me very happy.

So I want to start with something that I think about a lot.

You're a politically politically involved person.

You made a documentary about Zelensky.

You help run a humanitarian aid organization.

You're fully aware of the challenges we're all facing right now.

Given that, what makes you decide to take time away from focusing on addressing those challenges to do a movie?

And then do you ever wrestle with the utility of making art right now?

This is going to go a little sideways, but maybe in a good way.

In a way, I'd always kind of felt intuitively that it's all exactly the same thing, whether it's the acting or working with core or I do a lot of woodwork,

whatever the various kinds of things.

What happens hopefully over time is that the utility or or like what what I want to turn this into a conversation about is a discussion of what one does what their purpose is right what's our purpose your work as an actor is exactly the same job as your work as a craftsman or a welder or a or core representative

it just feels like

you know, which hammer are you picking up on that day to hopefully make a contribution?

So

it could be said that if an audience member goes to a movie and recognizes something from the story or from a character that is familiar and leaves them feeling, let's say, less alone for a moment, it's a similar relief and a similar moment of being able to breathe and be present.

And that's no different than to rebuild housing for someone.

It's all kind of one

thing.

Can you tell me a bit about what ideas drew you to one battle after another?

Well, it's sort of, in some ways, it's simpler than ideas.

I had

briefly worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on Licorice Pizza.

But more than that, I'd known him for a very long time.

And

he had offered me a movie.

Which movie was that?

It was the one that Adam Sandler did.

Oh, Punch Drunk Love.

Punch Drunk Love.

And I read it, and the only reason I didn't do it

is because it wasn't that I didn't like the role he was offering me.

It's that I couldn't do that movie and not do the Adam Sandler part.

I had an approach in my head, very different than what Adam did beautifully, but a very different attack on it.

So I said, you know, let me know if Adam gets sick or drops out.

But anyhow, so there was a predisposition to work together, and we would always flirt with it when we would see each other.

And then

I got sent this.

And I knew Leo was attached.

I think I got about

10 to 15 pages in, and I was just, I could not have been happier with what he had decided to take on.

And I immediately told Paul, you know, tell me where to go.

You know, to me, the movie has a lot of tonal variation, but I found parts of it actually quite chilling, particularly the depiction of an America that appears to be run by fascistic white nationalists.

And you're not quite sure is this, you know, how much of an alternate reality is this really supposed to be showing us.

What's your answer to that question?

How close are we to the America that the film shows?

It's a good question, and I think a very good question for everyone to ask.

What is America?

Right?

Which, by the way, of course, we know never fulfilled its promise to everybody.

We know that, but that's part of it, it takes time to grow, right?

And I'm okay with that.

And,

you know, and I'm sorry if I'm in a lucky crew because of the color of my skin or the gender or whatever.

But, but I, you know, just sitting back, it looks like things are going to take time.

My father was blacklisted by the country he fought and risked his life for and had 100 medals on his chest.

And they told him he couldn't work again in the country.

And he couldn't even get any bitterness going towards it.

He just said, hey.

Speed bumps in the making of a country.

This was during the Hollywood blacklist, just for people who don't know.

Yeah.

And And I aspire to think that way.

We're in a period of incredible unpredictability and chaos and ugliness, a lot of ugliness, stupidity,

overdependence on technology,

misuse of it, disconnection.

But,

you know, maybe the way to deal with that is to say, that's okay.

What do I do tomorrow?

This fight for freedom.

And by the way, that's when it happens.

It happens in a fight.

Everything we always celebrated in America happened in a fight.

And guess why?

That's what being human is.

You know, your character in the film, Colonel Steve Lockjaw, is,

at least in my reading of him, he's this sort of stew of perversions and

insecurities.

Can you just tell me about how you thought about him or what went into him?

So there's a great conversation with the former president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, Jose Pepe Mujica, but Pepe to his friends, let's say.

And he was turning on its head this old idea that's been hardwired into us,

how if we don't understand history, we are bound to repeat it.

When in fact all history tells us is that we are bound to repeat it, period.

And if we are going to improve, it's not from reading history books, it's from going through the hell that we create for ourselves and others through our own experience.

The human being has to experience it themselves.

Now,

has that applied to Lockjaw and what I saw?

I think

that one of the reasons we can be cynical about humankind

is

because

we idealize humankind.

And I think what I was reading was someone who worships at the Church of Lethality

and understands lethality.

And from that foundation,

Paul's writing all made sense to me.

There was a roundtable you just did for the Times with some of your colleagues from one battle after another.

And in it, you said prior to working with Paul Thomas Anderson, you'd sort of been burnt out or disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years.

Yeah, well, really prior to working with Christy Hall and Dakota Johnson.

Oh, on Daddy O.

I got two gifts in one year that broke a 15-year

sort of depression about the movies.

What was that depression about?

Why were you disinterested in acting?

I think that for a long time,

I

gauged

the value that a film would have to me to begin with

on

what we'll call a good script, a good cast, and a good director,

and a subject that I would want to go see a movie about.

Those things were enough

for a while.

You get older, you become more aware of the sacrifices that time,

it's about time, right?

Which we don't get more of.

And it's not enough to work with people you respect and like.

You want the same thing you find in family.

You want to be people you love.

And it wasn't since Gus Van Zandt's movie, Milk,

that I'd had that kind of feeling.

So I kept taking these jobs that I thought were good jobs about good subjects with good directors.

And I was missing my family, whatever that meant, literally my dog.

And I said, what the fuck am I doing here?

And especially when you're playing like a leading role or you have a lot of, you know, like younger actors on things, there was a responsibility to take on as a kind of leader on the energy and the focus on the set.

And I'm faking it.

And you're miserable when you're faking it, really miserable, and even resentful.

And

what do you want that guy around for?

And I just felt like maybe I'm done with all this.

Do you think the work suffered during the period?

No question about it.

You are given automatic cover if you've had, you know, once you represent a certain kind of quality stamp and you get away with too much.

I remember Marlon said to me one time

he would call it,

i'd really have to suit up for that one you know and and i remember i was doing a play in san francisco and

he was intermittent i'm stealing this description

jack nicholson's very good with words due nicholson delivering it though

he says uh

you know old marl

He's intermittently contemptuous.

And backstage in San Francisco at the the Magic Theater,

Marlon's call comes through out of the blue.

What are you doing?

Because he hadn't been in touch for a few months.

He didn't know I was doing a play.

Well, I was about to open in the fucking play, like the next day.

And he hears this and he says, you know, the idea of opening it in a play to me

would be like summoning up the Inquisition.

And

I got to the point where

I was feeling like

suiting up was summoning up the Inquisition and

to get re-enthused and to feel your imagination opening up again and

to connect with the childlike thing that comes with inventing a character.

When you've lost touch with that and then you rediscover it, I think

it's even better.

When you were sort of coming up in the 80s, you became friends with people like Nicholson, Brando, Charles Bukowski.

You were friendly with the novelist Harry Cruz, the great actor Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, all kind of these

figures who had an aura of rebelliousness.

And it seems like those were folks that you sought out, and they were all quite a bit older than you.

What were you looking for from from your relationships with people like that?

You know, this, you know, this funny thing we do sometimes, like, like, what age do you feel?

What, you know, how do you identify?

Yeah.

Right

from a young age, out loud, I've always, and still today, it's very specific.

It's 77.

You feel 77.

I can't wait.

I know that guy.

Like, that's that, that's when I look in the mirror, I'm waiting for that guy to show up.

My father died at 77.

I had already already chosen 77.

Paging Dr.

Freud.

There be a connection.

Well, that means I'll live longer because he started smoking a lot earlier

and didn't do a lot of exercise.

But

yes, I find it easier, let's say, to have a friendship where

you're not going to be frowned upon if you say, hey, you want to get a drink?

I have, you know, nowadays, one has friends that will, you know, get a green juice or something.

There's nothing wrong with green juice.

There's nothing wrong with anything anybody wants to do that doesn't hurt someone else.

I'm just talking about my own personal enjoyment.

I like to share a drink with someone.

And then also,

these are all the people you mentioned were all,

yes, the kind of people that excited me about the job.

These were just interesting guys who I liked a lot who were incredibly generous towards me as friends and also as, you know, encouragers, supporters of

the kinds of stories I wanted to tell and how I wanted to work and so on.

There's a quote I saw that your mom, the actress Eileen Ryan, gave, I think she gave it to Woody Allen where

you were working with Woody on Sweet and Lowdown and Woody said he's something to the effect of, you know, he didn't quite get you or understand how to connect with you.

And your mom in her telling said to Woody, you know, it's like the thing you need to understand about Sean is that he's just embarrassed at having had a happy childhood.

You know, everybody's gotten that wrong.

And it is true.

I had a very happy, look, this place minus 80% of the houses is where I grew up.

Right.

I grew up in the valley until I was nine, but those years when you're becoming, you know,

somebody who's not just having his butt wiped.

It's a different age for everyone, though.

We're here.

This was Huckleberry Finn by the Sea.

I had two parents who were together from the day they met for 41 years, madly in love with each other.

Psychiatrists have been pushing, pushing, trying to find that capital T trauma in my childhood.

It's not there.

I made every demon door in my life as a young adult and forward.

I did it myself.

My parents were great, great, loving family, great brothers.

It was surfing

and surfing and surfing and the ocean every day.

And

yeah, I've never been embarrassed about that.

I feel lucky as hell about that.

I just, I was confused for a long time.

Why did I want to walk through all the fires I've built?

And, you know, and maybe I still sometimes do, but

that had nothing to do with my childhood.

That question followed the subject of your friendships with those guys I mentioned, because I wondered if something in you thought that guys like Dennis Hopper or Bukowski represented what an artist was supposed to be.

And we thought like the atmosphere of your youth was not conducive to the kind of artist you wanted to be.

My childhood was...

If I had one drawback, a lot of it was spent waiting for it to be over.

And there's a reason for that because of this barbaric enforcement of mandatory schooling in public schools, which stole a lot of my childhood.

I never spent a productive minute in school.

I didn't want to learn until I was older.

I would choose not to if I had to do it to do over again.

I resent that.

You're miserable, you're stressed, you're exhausted, and you're not in the ocean when there's a great swell because you're in a cement palace with some, you know, shit.

And I hated it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Tell the shrinks.

It was school.

It fucked me up.

But you know, the sort of the way you put it was, you know, you went through some fires.

And

in reading about you, primarily from the book, Sean Penn, His Life and Times, which, you know, probably was published about 20 years ago or so.

It was by Richard Kelly.

It was basically an authorized biography of you done in oral history.

Basically,

oral history fashion.

And there are a few references in there from people you worked with or people that you've done so much homework.

Well, I try.

But in the biography of you, a lot of people who you worked with and are close to you refer to you as having a real anger inside you.

Where does that anger come from?

Look around.

My reaction to people at large, I've always always stood by that I love humanity.

My problem is with humans.

You go to the market or even worse,

somebody who's had a well, anyone who has some affinity for excellence goes to the market and gets in line.

And

this person

who's at the register

was not really listening when they were taught how to use it.

And they're struggling with that while they're extending a personal conversation with the customer in front of you.

And you know that's not how life's supposed to be.

There's supposed to be an experience of professionalism.

You get on an airplane and a spirit

incompetence drives me out of my fucking mind.

It triggers me on

a level you can't imagine.

I start to equate my soul with a volcano.

And I'm okay with that because I'm learning more and more how to create separation.

Also, your dog just came in, though.

She knows me.

She has to console me.

Hey, baby, it's right here.

The problem you're looking for is right here.

Yeah, so yeah, there's anger.

And, you know,

I think anger is among the things that can fuel us, but we have to be fueled.

How does anger fuel fuel you?

Well,

when I allow it to fuel me productively,

I am

mission-focused because I know that if I go to extreme competence, it is the best way to fight the opposite.

Where did you, okay, so

you are highly competent.

This kind of homework is, I mean, maybe New York Times, it's normal.

I don't know.

But

where did all that come from?

I feel like if I'm going to have an expectation that the person is going to engage with me at a certain level, then I owe it to them and to myself to be as prepared as possible as a way to earn the right to have the kind of conversation that I want to have.

That all describes pride.

And I guess that's another thing I could say I think all too absent too much of the time.

You know, I've just gone through three fucking plumbers who are completely incompetent.

And I don't know how you get through the day that way.

That said, my next question is a goofy one that I just want to hear some details about the story behind it.

But in the biography of you, and this is an anecdote that's also repeated in a great profile of you by John Law from the New Yorker.

We could disagree about that, but go on.

Where they're describing

a misadventure in Macau in 1986, where apparently you,

you know, as one does sometimes, you dangled a pushy paparazzo over a balcony, then were sort of jailed after for, because you were in Macau filming Shanghai Surprise with Madonna.

Then you went to jail briefly, but you broke out of jail and escaped from the country.

And this is the detail that I need more information on, escaped from the country by jet foil.

Yeah.

More, please.

How did you find the jet foil?

That's how you get back and forth between

at the time.

Was there a jet foil waiting for you?

Did you know how to drive a jet foil?

It's like the ferry.

It's like they go back and forth all day long.

So it wasn't that exciting.

I didn't, no, we were passengers on the jet foil.

It was a straight run to the Oriental Hotel, not long.

By car, it took us coming in, maybe five minutes on foot.

It probably took us 10 minutes.

And we were running pretty fast

and just got on like normal passengers, and then had to go and hang out in a house on the Kowloon side and wait until something got settled.

But the guy, it was never, first of all,

we didn't put him past his waistline over that balcony, and there was never an intent to drop him off of it.

It was, it

started

with a friend, my friend at the time,

who was

my kickboxing trainer, who needed a job.

So I got him a job as like security.

And

he overreacted.

Definitely this guy was holding something when he jumped out at us.

And so he responded very instinctively toward the guy.

I responded instinctively toward the situation.

And about halfway to the balcony, I saw it was a camera and not a weapon or something like that.

So I was marching him through the room also to what was an open balcony.

And yeah, we got him about, you know, just holding him down across it.

And I'm yelling at my friend, you know, it's a camera, fuck it, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And we didn't have time to pull him back before the hotel security, who were walking us to the room, now turned on us and grabbed us off of him.

We never got to show we weren't going to kill him.

And that's when Midnight Express happens.

And we just blew out of there.

And

he didn't know what happened by the time we ran out the door.

And we ran through the jet foil, and that's the whole story.

Yeah.

I was secretly hoping there was kind of a more of a James Bond element, but Mystery Solved.

There was an interesting quote by you.

It's something actually, I have it written down.

You say that

hypocrisy is the primary experience of American life.

And I'm curious about how your own hypocrisy has shown up.

Well, daily?

Well, okay, just using this conversation.

If you gave me five minutes, I could come up with a good list of 10 people who can tell you stories of my own incompetence.

It doesn't mellow my anger at it.

Where I

really get upset on a societal level is that,

like arrogance,

hypocrisy has found its way

recently in a very potent way

into being what we might associate with charisma I think we're really dangerously adept at

giving celebration to great weaknesses and and as I said earlier, uglinesses, petty things.

But yes,

not speaking as someone separate from the problem.

I guess I try to stay within contradiction.

And I think what I'm talking about with myself is that I am certainly willfully contradictory.

Is there a contradiction that you could tease out for us?

Sure.

Ukraine deserves our full support in their killing people.

That's That's contradictory to almost anything else I would say or espouse.

I don't think there's another solution.

It's part of the solution.

It's not the whole solution.

But that's contradictory.

I do have a bunch of sort of more politically oriented questions, questions about CORE, but I feel like it would be tonally abrupt to move to those questions now.

So I'm going to save those for when we speak again in a few days.

But thanks for taking all the time today.

You bet.

And I'll talk to you again in a few days.

I appreciate a professional.

Thank you.

After the break, Sean and I speak again about the unsettling times we're living in and his reaction to Charlie Kirk's killing.

This one seems different.

It seems different than the members of Congress.

It seems different than the insurance executive.

It It seems different even than the attempt on the president.

There's something about this one.

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Hi, Sean.

Good morning.

So, you know, I think when we spoke last time, I said I was going to hold the political questions for this follow-up.

So that's what I'm going to do.

And we're just going to start in kind of a heavy place because I don't know how to get into it more easily.

Sure.

So, you know, we're talking again just a couple days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which is just another demoralizing event in what feels like the ongoing degradation of civic life in America.

I know that people's mileage may vary, to put it mildly, with your political opinions, but I do know that you take being an American citizen and what it means to be an American seriously.

So I want to know how you understand this moment.

Well, a couple of angles to take that from.

First of all,

I think just as a human on earth, it's fair to say I'm processing what happened the other day.

I've increasingly lost any kind of understanding about why we have as a country become so compliant with the public facing polarization.

When any of us who step out at all, talk to, let's say, each other at all, understand that

while there's this incredible partisanship that is expressed in the power

hustling of politics

and media, it isn't so that that's the case with individuals.

And I'm getting to Charlie Kirk.

You know, the old adage about we have so much more in common than we do in distance, you know,

is so true.

These fashions of violence,

and we might be on the precipice of this one seems different.

It seems different than the members of Congress.

It seems different than the insurance executive.

It seems different even than the attempt on the president.

There's something about this one.

Charlie Kirk,

it seemed to me, I didn't follow him a lot.

It seemed to me was one of these people who certainly I disagree with on what almost everything,

truly believed everything that we disagreed on.

I didn't get the sense that he was one of these snake oil salesmen.

I think we need that guy.

We need that debate.

We aren't perfect.

We've got to fight it out and find the center on shit and find a compromise.

If somebody really believes something,

that's your friend.

Well, it depends what they believe, right?

Well, I'm not talking about some sociopathic Nazism.

I'm talking about if somebody believes that a human being starts at conception,

if you can't understand that concept, you're just stupid.

And if you're not willing to tolerate the concept as a concept that's held, and as deeply as one may hold that belief,

and as deeply as I may have have a belief that I don't know, let the woman decide.

All of these are valid opinions.

What's the consensus in society, civilly?

And

we're taking the easy chicken shit road out

when we start to put

this murderer

who shot the insurance executive.

I'm no fan of health insurance companies, but Jesus, man, is that the best argument you got?

Do you think President Trump has beliefs?

I am not able to discern them.

You had made the documentary about Zelensky and Ukraine's superpower, which came out, I think, in 2023.

Have you spoken to Zelensky since making that film?

Yes.

Do you have a sense of how he understands

Trump and America's actions towards Ukraine in 2025?

Oh, I think he has developed a very sophisticated understanding of it.

Yeah.

What is that understanding, to the best of your knowledge?

It wouldn't be for me to say anything that's going to reflect on what he communicates to the President of the United States.

You know, also in Superpower, there's just a brief mention of when

you and Jack Nicholson were at the film festival in Moscow for, I guess it was for the pledge, and you had some, you know, sit-down of some type with Vladimir Putin.

And in the film, you just glancingly referred to that meeting as a deviant memory.

I'm wondering if you can tell me any more about what your impressions of Putin were.

Did you feel like you had a

chance to get any sense of him as a human being?

I was by no means a student of the fellow at that time.

You know, by now,

I find him transparent and almost uninteresting.

Why is that?

I think it's his inability to

face a new world

makes him static.

People are allured by the spook history of him with KGB.

Still, this is just one very talented man.

But the alphabet of his

manipulations from the expressions he gives in inflection and voice to what's in his eyes, when he smiles, when he doesn't, the sarcasm,

the sincerity, when he's serious and telling his people this or that, or using a speech to them to tell it to us, whatever the case may be.

I've seen the tape too many times and I'm just bored and disgusted.

So you're saying you think he's a limited actor?

Well, everyone's a limited actor.

I guess I was saying it, circling back to what I said before, but no one more limited than the static.

Yeah.

How have your politics changed over time?

I think I idealize humanity less.

And in that, I understand that we're going to keep killing each other for the foreseeable future.

I'm a little more pragmatic about

how to support the ability to do terrible things when we have to.

But if you're at the same place politically when you're older as you were when you're younger, I think you're adding a problem to the world.

It's static.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

I just remembered, I brought my family on a safari many years ago, and we went out to visit a very unhabitated in terms of tourists,

Maasai tribe.

They'd never seen white people before.

And I said to our guide,

who

had come from that tribe, but actually had gone off to university and come back,

I said,

it's so incredible, it's so enriching to see

a culture so preserved.

And he said, don't do that.

He said, anything that remains static dies.

And I think that in this country,

if this can be a turning point, this Charlie Kirk thing, in a positive,

that's true for his supporters in honoring the memory of the guy or for his detractors,

it's understanding that we are not going to be what we were before.

We can be better, we can be worse.

But what's going to be the architecture of the new America?

I think that's where we can put our hope and encouragement and our imagination, which is really the only thing that's going to get us anywhere.

Just to turn a little bit more explicitly to the subject of artists and politics.

I don't know if you pay attention to this kind of stuff or if you're aware, but there was a pledge that more than 2,000 people in the film industry signed.

That's tantamount to a boycott of the Israeli movie industry.

It's, of course, in response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that people signed it, like Javier Bardem, who you've worked with, Emma Stone, Adam McKay, Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox, Mark Ruffalo.

Do you see value in cultural boycotts generally?

And what's your view of this one specifically?

I wasn't aware of it.

I've been, I was kind of off-grid for a few weeks.

I'm catching up now, so I haven't heard about this.

Typically, I kind of have an allergy to movements or group things.

I think coming out of the 1960s, where

as a kid, I'm, you know, I certainly grew up in an anti-engagement in Vietnam war family.

You know, I thought this anti-war movement was the coolest goddamn thing until so many in it started using that term baby killer.

And so I get a little bit scared.

I'd rather kind of, if I'm going to boycott something, I kind of

want to do it myself and see if other people do the same.

But,

but.

I think there's time and place for it.

And I have and would consider things.

This one, i it's tricky very tricky who does it punish what are the real holds on free speech there

you know the the far right and netanyahu are um

are truly criminal problems that's got nothing to do with um

let's say the better intersex between israel and the united states this current administration

is an enemy of every state and and humanity at this stage.

In the current Israeli administration.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I may well support that.

I just don't know how it affects things, and I want to know better before I considered it.

Has your humanitarian group, CORE, has it looked at trying to help in Gaza?

You know, my co-founder called me

after that

really, really awful day, right?

October 7th, you mean?

Yeah.

And we work in conflict zones.

We work, we've been in Ukraine since day one.

We're working in Sudan.

And so we have people who are, you know, they know the risks of where they're going to so on.

But part of my job is, you know, rational consideration of risk-benefit.

And my feeling right from go was I don't trust any of our

governmental organizational contacts on either side.

And I'm not ready to ask our people to go there.

And I had friends whose organizations went in and they lost some people.

And so, yeah, so I'm sure that we will at some point engage with the aftermath of that situation, but we have not to date.

You know,

I'm sure there's some part of you that

blanches at the word celebrity, but you are a celebrity.

And being a celebrity activist or humanitarian, whatever label one wants to put on it, cuts in different ways.

You know, you can bring positive attention to a cause, as you did, you know, in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 or as you're doing with Ukraine, or your celebrity can, in some cases, overshadow the cause.

I think the example here would be your Rolling Stone piece about the Mexican drug lord El Chapo, which even you referred to as a failure because you had written it hoping to start a conversation about U.S.

drug policy.

mostly it became a conversation about you and how you got access and El Chapo's approval and, you know, even in some cases, your writing of the story.

So my question is, do you feel like you have any control over the relationship between your celebrity and how it shines a light on the issues that you care about?

First of all, I would agree with everything you just said.

And I would also, you know, project that out to every

daily journalist in the world, that there's going to be a time where it's going to affect things in a negative way.

I would even say that the majority of the mainstream press does that more than not.

It does what more than not?

Adversely affects society.

You know, these kind of editorial screaming matches between non-experts has become the fashion of the day, taking up our valuable

airtime and time that we need to be informed about what's really going on in the world and how, you know, all of us have a responsibility to engage and do something about it, whatever that little or big thing is.

You know, so which is only to say, there was a lot of bullshit, but it didn't matter because I should have seen that bullshit coming.

And so

how do you not immunize yourself, but how do you immunize the impact of the story?

And you do have to consider that.

You do have to consider the optics when you step out into that ring, for sure.

And so

You take lessons learned and try to do it better.

What other lessons did you learn from the El El Chapo story?

You know, this is a very difficult one for me to talk about because there are things that

it's a long tale if I start to talk about it.

And it's also that to connect the dots, I'm talking about some people

who

I do not want adversely affected by what I would say.

Right.

So I don't, it's not that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of talking about it.

I'm uncomfortable because mechanically, I don't know how to communicate it without the parts that I don't want to communicate on behalf of others.

I get what you're saying.

What's in your glass, by the way?

What are you drinking this morning?

Orange una.

Straight?

Straight on the rocks.

Lots of people can get involved in politics.

And for a lot of reasons, whether it's humility or whether it's timidity, Not a lot of people

have the thing that you seem to have, which is the desire or willingness to be a man in the arena, you know, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt.

Who or what compelled that feeling in you that you didn't just want to give money or watch from the sideline, that you wanted to be there on the ground?

Mohammed Ali, Bob Geldof, Bono,

George.

George Harrison, you mean?

Clooney.

Harrison,

concert from Bangalore.

You can't just say George.

Concert from Bangalore Dash.

Well, it's because he's in the current conversation so much.

George Clooney, right?

Yeah.

You know, I was watching the CNN documentary on LiveAid, and

I was at LiveAid, and I, you know, I didn't know anything about anything that was going on at the time.

Were you there with Madonna?

Yeah.

And

what it led to was astonishing.

I mean, you know, Bono is.

You talk about somebody who's, you know, stands with empathy.

It would take too long.

I'll save it for somebody wants to talk to me about him for a book i could tell you stories that the world doesn't know about this guy that i mean he's an extraordinary extraordinary human being you know what name you didn't mention in that list of uh influences you just gave was uh

was your father my uh

hunch uh this is just my psychoanalysis from afar, is that some part of your desire

and maybe even need to try and participate in the world and do good in the world comes from wanting to live up to the ideal of your father who stood up to the Hollywood blacklist and on top of that was a sort of heroic fighter pilot in the Second World War.

Yeah, not a pilot.

He was a tailgunner and a bombardier.

Sorry.

I'm sure you're right.

I'm sure you're right.

You know, he's been my hero.

in everything.

Most significantly, I think just a guy who

remained gentle and never entered bitter.

I think I'd be raving if I, you know, flew 37 missions, shot down twice and barely made it over Allied lines, and then was told I can't work in the country I fought for and risked my life for.

I think I'd be friggin' seething.

Not him.

Yeah.

In fact, whenever I was seething, I'd come home with an opinion about something.

Somebody else thought this.

And

he'd listen, listen, listen, listen.

And he'd just say,

everybody has their own truth, kid.

You know,

we talked about how in the relatively recent past, you know, you struggled with motivation about acting.

And I know also that,

you know, it's again, something that came up in the conversation, but I know also that you can feel a lot of anger at the world.

So

what gets you up in the morning these days?

I don't think that I have felt, I felt I

and I'm not averse to feeling extremely frustrated with the world.

The world.

We know what we're saying, I think.

I don't want to be grandiose, but

or I don't know how not to be.

I was going to say what

stop now.

Yeah.

But

I haven't experienced, let's say, anything like,

I don't even know if I would call what Russia and Putin are up to right now something that I engage in a lot of rage about.

I don't need the rage to get me to a clarity of knowing how evil and obscene it is.

And so

the frustration is with those who are not willing to be sober

enough to recognize our sacred duty to support the defense of Ukraine.

But I don't even call that anger so much.

And I certainly haven't experienced anything like depression.

Sadness, yes, I've lost a lot of friends in the last years.

Sadness, sure, but depression, no.

I wake up every fucking day.

This eye is clear about the threat to the environment, the anguish people are going through, attempts to figure out how or where I can be any value added.

This one is driving me from the time I wake up.

And all I see is that right now, this is still a fucking magic trick of a beautiful cosmos to be gifted with.

And I am going to fucking enjoy it every day.

And I do.

You know, sorry to those who would have me do otherwise, but I am feeling great.

Sean, thanks for taking all the time to talk with me.

I appreciate it.

You bet.

I'll catch up with you for a green juice someday.

I might spike mine.

I'll bring a flask.

That's Sean Penn.

His new movie, One Battle After Another, is in theaters now.

His conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme and Seth Kelly.

It was edited by Annabel Bacon.

Mixing by Sonia Herrero.

Original music by Pat McCusker and Marion Lozano.

Photography by Devin Yalkin.

Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Paola Newdorf is our senior video journalist.

Our executive producer is Allison Benedict.

Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Barelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nafim Shapiro, Maddie Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick.

Also, we have a YouTube channel where you can watch lots of our interviews.

Subscribe at youtube.com/slash at symbol the interview podcast.

I'm David Marchese, and this is the interview from the New York Times.

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