Transcript of '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 Marcaisey. Sean Penn's new movie, One Battle After Another, is tough to pin down. Written and directed by Paul Thomas-Anderson and costarring 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 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-run 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 got to 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? Yeah. Are you ready? Sure. Do I need to give a spiel beforehand? You know basically what we're doing here, right?

Let's find out as we go.

Can you just explain to the audience where we're doing this interview? I would call this your Man Cave or The John Penn version of Elvis's 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. I am not 45, I'm 65, and I can forget things that are impossible to forget. I look around the room and I go, I knew that guy, or I was in that place at that time. 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.

I want to start with something that I think about a lot. You're a 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 felt intuitively that it's all exactly the same thing, whether it be 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 What I want to turn this into a conversation about is the 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 core representative. It just feels like, which hammer are you picking up on that day to hopefully make a contribution? 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. That's no different than to rebuild housing for someone. It's all one thing.

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

Well, 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. He had It 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 an attack on it. So I said, Let me know if Adam gets sick or drops out. But anyhow, 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 could not have been happier with what he had decided to take on. I immediately told Paul, Tell me where to go.

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. You're not quite sure, 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? Which, by the way, of course, we know never fulfilled its promise to everybody. We know that, but that's part of...

It takes time to grow, right?

And I'm okay with that. And I'm sorry if I'm in lucky crew because of the color of my skin or the gender or whatever. But 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.

And I aspire to think that way. We're in a period of incredible unpredictable and chaos and ugliness, a lot of ugliness, stupidity, over-dependence on technology, misuse of it, disconnection.

But 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.

Your character in the film, Colonel Steve Lockja, is, at least in my reading of him, he's this 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. He was turning on his 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. Read. 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 Lock jaw and what I saw? I think that one of the reasons we can be cynical about humankind is because we idealize humankind. I think what I was reading was someone who worships at the Church of Lethality and understands lethality. 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 been burnt out or disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years.

Yeah, well, really prior to working with Christie Hall and Dakota Johnson. Oh, on Daddy-O. I got two gifts in one year that broke a 15-year depression about the movies.

What was that depression about? Why were you is interested in acting?

I think that for a long time, I gage 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 get more aware of the sacrifices that time. It's about time, 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 Zand's movie, Milk, that I'd had that 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 a leading role or you have a lot of younger actors, there is a responsibility to take on as a leader on the energy and the focus on the set, and I'm faking it. And you're miserable you're faking it.

Really miserable, 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?

Yeah, no question about it. You are given automatic cover once you represent a certain quality stamp and you get away with too much. I remember Marlin said one time, he would call it I'd really have to suit up for that one. I remember I was doing a play in San Francisco, and he was intermittent. I'm stealing this description. Jack Nicholson is very good with words.

Do Nicholson delivering it, though?

He said, You know, Marl, he's intermittently contentious. And backstage in San Let's go to the Magic Theater. Marlin's call comes through out of the blue. What are you doing? Because we hadn't been in touch for a few months. He didn't know I was doing a play. I was about to open in the fucking play, like the next day. And he hears this and he says, The idea of opening in a play, to me, would be like summing up the Inquisition. And I got to the point where I was feeling like suiting up was summing 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 discover it, I think it's even better.

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

You were friendly with the novelist, Harry Cruise, the great actor, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, all these figures who had an aura of rebelliousness.

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 your relationships with people like that.

You know this funny thing we do sometimes? What age do you feel?

How do you identify?

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. When I look in the mirror, I'm waiting for that guy to show up. My father died at '77. I had already chosen '77.

Paging Dr. Freud.

Might 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? Nowadays, one has friends that will get a green juice or something.

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 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 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 Low Down.

And what he said, he's something to the effect of, he didn't quite get you or understand how to connect with you. And your mom in her telling said to Woody, it's like, The thing you need to understand about Sean is that he's just embarrassed at having had a happy childhood.

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. I grew up in the valley till I was nine. But those years when you're becoming somebody who's not just having his butt wiped.

It's a different It's your 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 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 Loving Family, Great Brothers. It was surfing and surfing and surfing and the ocean every day. I've never been embarrassed about that. I feel lucky as hell about that. I was confused for a long time. Why did I want to walk through all the fires I built? Maybe I still sometimes do, but I 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 the atmosphere of your youth was not conducive to the 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 It was a great swell because you're in a cement palace with some shit, and I hated it. Yeah. Okay. Tell the shrinks. It was school. It fucked me up.

But the way you put it was you went through some fires. And in reading about you, primarily from the book, Sean Penn, His Life and Times, which probably was published about 20 years ago or so, was by Richard Kelly was basically an authorized biography of you done in oral history fashion. There are a few references in there from people you worked with or people close to you.

We'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 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-What are you talking about? 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 I know. I'm okay with that because I'm learning more and more how to create separation.

Also, your dog just came in.

She knows me. She has to console me. Hey, baby, it's right here. The problem you're looking for is right here. I think anger is among the things that can fuel us, but we have to be fueled.

How does anger you, 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...

Okay, so...

Yeah?

You are highly competent. This homework 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 conversation that I want to have.

That all describes pride. I guess that's another thing I could say. I is all too absent too much of the time. 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 Lahr from the New Yorker.

We could disagree about that, but go on.

Oh, we're describing misadventure in Macao in 1986, where apparently, as one does, sometimes you dangled a pushy paparazzi over a balcony, then were jailed after for...

Because you were in Macao 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 theJetfoil.

That's how you get back and forth between...

At the time. Was there a jetfoil waiting for you? Did you know how to drive a jetfoil?

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

So it wasn't that exciting?

No, we were passengers on the jetfoil. 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 Caloon 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 started with my friend at the time who was My kickboxing trainer who needed a job, so I got him a job as 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 in 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 just holding him down across it.

And I'm yelling at my friend, it's a camera, fuck it. 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 to the jet foil. And that's the whole story.

I was secretly hoping there was a more of a James Bond element.

But Mr..

Rizal, 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.

How so? Yeah, how? 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, Ipocrisy 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 as I said earlier, uglinesses, petty things. But yes, I'm not speaking as someone separate from the problem. I guess I try to stay within contradiction. I think what I'm talking about 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 contradictory to almost anything else I would say or spouse. 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 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. 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 seems different even in the attempt on the president. There's something about this one.

This podcast is supported by Metta.

Apps can help teenagers connect, learn, and create. But not every app is right for every teen. Parents to have a choice in which online services their teenagers can access. That's why Instagram supports the initiative for an EU digital majority age, requiring parental approval before teenagers can access online services, including social media. Learn more at Instagram. Com/parentalapproval. This political ad was brought to you by Instagram. From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Markezi. Sean Penn's new movie, One Battle After Another, is tough to pin down. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and costarring 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 Hunter is also, in his own way, a 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 got to 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? Yeah. Are you ready? Sure. Do I need to give a spiel before You know basically what we're doing here, right?

Let's find out as we go. Can you just explain to the audience where we're doing this interview? I would call this your Man Cave or the John Penn version of Elvis's 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. I am not 45, I'm 65, and I can forget things that are impossible to forget. 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 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 felt intuitively that it's all exactly the same thing, whether it's 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 what I want to turn this into a conversation about is the 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 a welder or a core representative. It just feels like, 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.

That's no different than to rebuild housing for someone. It's all one thing. Can you tell me a bit about what ideas drew you to one battle after another? Well, in some ways, it's simpler than ideas. I had briefly worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on Lickish 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 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, 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 could not have been happier with what he had decided to take on.

And I immediately told Paul, Tell me where to go. 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. You're not quite sure 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? Which, by the way, of course, we know never fulfilled its promise to everybody. We know that. But that's part of... It takes time to grow. I'm okay with that. I'm sorry if I'm in a lucky crew because of the color of my skin or the gender or whatever. But 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. Had 100 metals 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 I aspire to think that way. We're in a period of incredible unpredictable and chaos and ugliness, a lot of ugliness, stupidity, over-dependence on technology, a misuse of it. Disconnection. But maybe the way to deal with that is to say, That's okay. What do I do tomorrow? And 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. Your character in the film, Colonel Steve Lockjaw, is, at least in my reading of him. He's this stew of perversions and insecurities. Can you just tell me about how you thought about him or what went into him? There's a great conversation with the former President of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, Jose Pepe Mujica, but Pepe to his friends, let's say. He was turning on his 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.

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 Lock jaw and what I saw? I think that one of the reasons we can be cynical about humankind is because we idealize humankind. I think what I was reading was someone who worships at the Church of Lethality. And understands lethality. 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. In it, you said prior to working with Paul Thomas Anderson, you'd been burnt out or disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years. Yeah, we're really Prior to working with Christie Hall and Dakota Johnson. Oh, on Daddy-O. I got two gifts in one year that broke a 15-year depression about the movies. What was that depression about? Why were you disinterested in acting? I think that for a long time, I gage 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 get more aware of the sacrifices that time. It's about time, which we don't get more of. It's not enough to work with people who 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 Zand's movie, Milk, that I'd had that 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 on here, and especially when you're playing a leading role or you have a lot of younger actors. There is a responsibility to take on as a 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, 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? Yeah, no question about it. You are given automatic cover if you've had... Once you represent a certain quality stamp and you get away with too much. I remember Marlin said to me one time, he would call it, I'd really have to suit up for that one. And I remember I was doing a play in San Francisco, and he was intermittent. I'm stealing this description, Jack Nicholson It's very good with words. Duhnickelson delivering it, though. He says, You know, Marl, he's intermittently contemptuous. And backstage in San Francisco at the Magic Theater, Marlind's call comes through out of the blue. What are you doing? Because we hadn't been in touch for a few months. He didn't know I was doing a play. I was about to open in the fucking play, the next day. And he hears this and he says, The idea of opening in a play to me would be like summing up the Inquisition. And I got to the point where I was feeling like suiting up was summing up the Inquisition. And to get re-enthusued 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 coming up in the '80s, you became friends with people like Nicholson, Brando, Charles Bukowski. You were friendly with the novelist Harry Cruise, Who's the great actor, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, all these figures who had an aura of rebelliousness. 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 your relationships with people like that? You know this funny thing we do sometimes? What age do you feel? How do you identify? 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. When I look in the mirror, I'm waiting for that guy to show up. My father died at '77. I had already chosen '77. Paging Dr. Freud. Might 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 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? Nowadays, one has friends that will get a green juice or something. 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, the people you mentioned were all, yes, the 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 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 Low Down. And Woody said he's subbing to the effect of he didn't quite get you or understand how to connect with you. And your mom, in her telling, said to Woody, it's like, the thing you need to understand about Sean is that he's just embarrassed at having had a happy childhood. 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. I grew up in the valley till I was nine. But those years when you're becoming 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 in pushing, pushing, trying to find that 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, loving family, great brothers. It was surfing and surfing and surfing and the ocean every day. I've never been embarrassed about that. I feel lucky as hell about that. I was confused for a long time. Why did I want to walk through all the fires I built? Maybe I still sometimes do, but I 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 the atmosphere of your youth was not conducive to the 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 shit, and I hated it. Yeah. Okay. Tell the shrinks, it was school. It fucked me up. But you know the way you put You went through some fires. And in reading about you, primarily from the book, Sean Penn, His Life and Times, which probably was published about 20 years ago or so, was by Richard Kelly, was basically an authorized biography of you done in oral history fashion. And there are a few references in there from people you work with or people 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 What are you talking about? 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. I'm okay with that because I'm learning more and more how to create separation. Also, your dog just came in. She knows me. She has to console me. Hey, baby, It's right here. The problem you're looking for is right here. Yeah. I think anger is among the things that can fuel us, but we have to be fueled.

How does anger 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... Okay, so... Yeah? You are highly competent. This 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 conversation that I want to have. That all describes pride. I guess that's another thing I could say, I think is all too absent too much of the time. 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 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 Lahr from the New Yorker.

We could disagree about that, but go on.

Oh, we're describing a misadventure in Macau in 1986, where apparently, as one does, sometimes you dangled a pushy paparazzo over a balcony, then were jailed after for... Because you were in Macao 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 jetfoil. Yeah. More, please. How did you find the jetfoil? That's how you get back and forth between at the time. Was there a jetfoil waiting for you? Did you know how to drive a jetfoil? It's like the ferry. It's like they go back and forth all day long. So it wasn't that exciting? We were passengers on the jetfoil. 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. 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 Caloon 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 started with my friend at the time who was my kickboxing trainer who needed a job. So I got him a job as 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 in 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 just holding him down across it. And I'm yelling at my friend, it's a camera, fuck it, whatever. 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. 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 to the jet foil, and that's the whole story.

I was secretly hoping there was a more of a James Bond element. But Mr. Rizal, 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. I'm curious about how your own hypocrisy has shown up. Well, daily. How so? Yeah, how? 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 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 as I said earlier, uglinesses, petty things. But yes, I'm not speaking as someone separate from the problem. I guess I try to stay within contradiction. And I think what I'm talking about myself is that I am certain 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 contradictory to almost anything else I would say or spouse. 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 more politically-oriented questions, questions about core, but I feel like it would be tonally abrupt to move to those questions now. 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. I'll talk to you again in a few days. I appreciate it, 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 seems different even in the attempt on the President. There's something about this one. This podcast is supported by Metta. Apps can help teenagers connect, learn, and create. But not every app is right for every teen. Parents should have a choice in which online services their teenagers can access. That's why Instagram supports the initiative for an EU digital majority age, requiring parental approval before teenagers can access online services, including social media.

Learn more at Instagram. Com/parentalapproval. This political ad was brought to you by Instagram. I'm Judson Jones. I'm a reporter and meteorologist at the New York Times. For about two decades, I've been covering extreme weather, which is getting worse because of climate change, and it's becoming more important to get timely and accurate weather information. That's why we send these customized newsletters letting you know up to three days in advance about extreme weather that could impact you or a place you care about. At the Times, you can be confident that everything we publish is based off the most accurate, scientific, and vetted information available to us because we want you to be able to make real-time decisions about how to go about your life. This is the work that makes subscribing to the New York Times so valuable, and it's how you can support fact-based independent journalism. So if you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes. Com/subscribe.

Hi, Sean.

Good morning.

I think when we spoke last time, I said I was going to hold the political questions for this follow-up. That's what I'm going to do. We're just going to start in a heavy place because I don't know how to get into it more easily. Sure. We're talking again just a couple of 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 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 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. I'm getting to Charlie Kirk. The old adage about we have so much more in common than we do in distance 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 in 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 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. 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 a belief that, I don't know, let the woman decide. All of these are valid opinions. What's the consensus in society, civilly? 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?

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

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.

Also in Superpower, there's just a brief mention of when you and Jack Nicholson were at the film festival in Moscow, I guess it was for the pledge, and you had some sit down of some type with Vladimir Putin. In the film, you just glancingly refer 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. By now, I find him transparent and almost uninteresting.

Why 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.

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

Well, everyone's 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. In that, I understand that we're going to keep killing each other for the foreseeable future. So 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 unhabituated, in terms of tourist, Maasai tribe. They'd never seen white people before.

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. He said, Don't do that. He said, Anything that remains static dies. I think that in this country, If this can be a turning point, this Charlie Kirek 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 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. We've worked with Emma Stone, Adam McKay, Waking Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox, Mark Ruffalo.

Do you see value in cultural boycott generally? And what's your view of this one, specifically?

I wasn't aware of it. I was off-grid for a few weeks. I'm catching up now, so I haven't heard about this. Typically, I have an allergy to movements or group things. I think coming out of the 1960s, where as a kid, I certainly I grew up in an anti-engagement Vietnam war family. 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, if I'm going to boycott something, I want to do it myself and see if other people do the same. But I think there's time and place for it, and I have and would consider things This one, it's tricky. Very tricky. Who does it punish? What are the real holds on free speech there? The far right and Netanyahu are truly criminal problems that's got nothing to do with, let's say, the better intersects between Israel and the United States. This current administration is an enemy of every state and humanity at this stage.

You mean the current Israeli administration? Yeah.

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?

My co founder called me after that really awful day, right?

October seventh, you mean?

Yeah. And we work in conflict zones. We've been in Ukraine since day one. We're working in Sudan. And so we have people who are... They know the risks of where they're going, so on. But part of my job is rational consideration of risk It's a benefit. 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. I had friends whose organizations went in, and they lost some people. I'm sure that we will at some point, engage with the aftermath of that situation, but we have not to date.

I'm sure there's some part of you that blanches at the word celebrity, but you are a celebrity.

Being a celebrity activist or humanitarian, whatever label one wants to put on it, cuts in different ways. You can bring positive attention to a cause, as you did 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 US drug policy, and mostly it became a conversation about you and how you got access and El Chapo's approval, and even in some cases, your writing of the story.

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 I agree with everything you just said. I would also 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.

Wait, does what more than not?

Adversely affects society. These editorial screaming matches between non-experts has become the fashion of the Day, taking up our valuable air time and time that we need to be informed about what's really going on in the world and how all of us have a responsibility to engage and do something about it, whatever that little or big thing is. Which is only to say there was a lot of bullshit, but it didn't matter because I should have seen that bullshit coming. 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 Chapo story?

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.

It's not that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of talking about it. I'm uncomfortable because mechanically, I don't 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 rock.

So lots of people can get involved in politics. 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, 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?

Muhammad Ali, Bob Gilduff, Bono, George.

George Harrison, you mean?

Clooney. Harrison.

A concert for- You can't just say George.

That's a common name.

Concert for Bangladesh.

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

George Clooney, right? Yeah.

I was watching the CNN documentary on Live Aid, and I was at Live Aid, and I didn't know anything about anything that was going on at that time.

Were you there with Madonna?

Yeah.

What it led to was astonishing. I mean, Bono is...

You talk about somebody who stands with empathy.

It would take too long. I'll save it for somebody who wants to talk to me about him for a book.

I could tell you stories that the world doesn't know about this guy.

I mean, he's an extraordinary human being.

You know what name you didn't mention in that list of influences you just gave was your father.

My hunch, 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 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.

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 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 frigging seething. Not him. In fact, whenever I was seething, I'd come home with an opinion about something. If somebody else thought this, he'd listen, listen, listen. He'd just say, Everybody has their own truth, kid.

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

I know also that, 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. What gets you up in the morning these days?

I don't think I have felt, and I'm not adverse 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, why stop now?

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

That's Sean Penn. His new movie, One Battle After Another, is in theaters now. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orm and Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker and Marion Lozano. Photography by Devon Yalkin. Our senior Booker is Priya Matthew, and Paula Newdorff is our senior video journalist. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Ronan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Hafim Shapiro, Maddie Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnik. Also, we have a YouTube channel where you can watch lots of our interviews. Subscribe at youtube. Com/@symboltheinterviewpodcast. I'm David Markezi, and this is The Interview from the New York Times. This podcast is supported by Metta.

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