Pod Insights The Louis Theroux Podcast S5 EP2: Sean Penn on dining with Jack Nicholson and Putin, run-ins with the paparazzi, and his relationship with Zelenskyy About this episode Louis travels to Los Angeles to sit down with Hollywood heavyweight and international adventurer, Sean Penn. Renowned for award-winning roles in films like Milk, I Am Sam and Carlito’s Way, Sean discusses his colourful life and career, including dining with Jack Nicholson and Vladimir Putin in Moscow, his relationship with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his notorious run-ins with the paparazzi.
Warnings: Strong language.
Links/Attachments:
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzva_I8WPAg
Mystic River (2003)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7NktJhrRYQ
Milk (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5D07rmfwG0
Dead Man Walking (1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgvbfLNYumU
Carlito’s Way (1993)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZMd4Baswb4
The Apprentice (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_OeYJXXlw0
Superpower (2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54GUzUUM3w
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrcDonY-B8
TV Show: ‘Euphoria’ (2019 – Present) - HBO
https://www.hbo.com/euphoria
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056196/
TV Show: ‘Normal People’ (2020) - BBC / Hulu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1JQuWxt3cE
Shanghai Surprise (1986)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbW06buYw0Y
Song: ‘Like a Virgin’, Madonna (1984)
https://open.spotify.com/track/1ZPlNanZsJSPK5h9YZZFbZ
Becoming Madonna (2024) - Sky Documentaries
https://www.sky.com/watch/programme/4f309d01-57b4-42b1-92ca-82eef6ec747e
A Complete Unknown (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdV-Cs5o8mc
Audiobook: ‘Chronicles, Volume I’, Bob Dylan (narrated by Sean Penn) (2004)
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Chronicles-Volume-1-(Audio)/Bob-Dylan/9780743501613
TV Show: ‘Game of Thrones’ (2011-2019) - HBO
https://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w3fokY0kP0
Daddio (2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJrr2amlFyc
One Battle After Another (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap-j8e9J5U0
TV Show: ‘Merlin’ (2008-2012) - BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dq8tn/merlin-series-1-1-the-dragons-call?seriesId=b00mjlxv-structural-1-b00dr74v
I am Sam (2001)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir6_2EkhzAc
Credits:
Producer: Millie Chu
Assistant Producer: Maisie Williams
Production Manager: Francesca Bassett
Music: Miguel D’Oliveira
Audio Mixer: Tom Guest
Video Mixer: Scott Edwards
Shownotes compiled by Immie Webb
Executive Producer: Arron Fellows
A Mindhouse Production for Spotify
www.mindhouse.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 12,160 words · 3 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hello. Are there any listeners there?
0:04 Speaker 00 Not funny.
0:10 Speaker 00 Hello, it's me, Louis Theroux, and welcome back to the podcast affectionately known as the Louis Theroux Podcast.
0:24 Speaker 00 Today, I'm speaking to Hollywood heavyweight and buccaneering activist Sean Penn. You may be familiar with Sean's work in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Mystic River, Milk. You've got to see Milk. He plays the first openly gay elected official in America, I believe, Harvey Milk, the mayor of San Francisco, Dead Man Walking, Carlito's Way, and many, many more. Over his career, Sean's earned numerous accolades, including two Oscars, a Golden Globe, and an honorary Caesar.
0:58 Speaker 00 Whatever that is. It's a French award, is it? Sean has never been far from the headlines, not just for his incredible movies, or his highly-publicised relationships with Madonna, among others, about which we talk in the chat, and also his social and political activism, his relationship, well, actually friendship, let's say, with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, travelling to interview drug kingpin El Chapo Guzman, or, most recently, his vocal support of the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. We talk about these and more in our chat. We recorded this chat in March this year at his house in Malibu. Yes, it was an LTP
1:38 Speaker 00 location taping. We drove up into the hills. It was exciting. It was like, I mean, I guess not that long after the Hollywood fires. And there he lived, at the end of a drive, in the hills. There's some of the, you know, areas around LA, they've got a very wild wilderness feel, and Sean's house had that kind of atmosphere about it. He was there as we set up our cameras.
2:03 Speaker 00 Smoking a little bit, we were in his man cave, a man cave about which I got significant envy. Like, it was almost like the bridge of Star Trek, like, in the sense of he had his kind of, he had all his gadgets and accoutrements and everything was, he had a cockpit, kind of, with buttons and a place for cigarettes, a place for his remote control, things to fiddle with. It was like the dream scenario for a certain kind of guy who's looking for his space. I don't have one of those. I need one. As we got ready, it was clear, you know, we take a while setting up. He went off either
2:47 Speaker 00 to chop wood or to do some woodworking. It's referenced in the chat, but he kind of fills a lot of his time by doing carpentry, making shelves, I guess, or doing cabinet making, maybe, like, just, yeah, wood shop, they call that in America, shop, like, it's a thing that you learn at school. And then when we were ready, he came back and we got down to it. The chat starts, I think, in medias res, as we used to say in ancient Rome, in the middle of things. So there's no hanging about. We dive right in. A warning, there is some strong language in the episode. There was a little bit of passive smoking, is that
3:31 Speaker 00 the term? But not for you listeners, only for me. I quite enjoyed it. All of that and much, much more, coming up after this.
4:00 Speaker 00 Have you met Trump?
4:01 Speaker 01 I have, briefly, very briefly, many years ago.
4:04 Speaker 00 Because I was gonna say, you were married to Madonna, and this was in the 80s, and in New York, Trump was very much a New York animal, right?
4:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. I like to say I made the longest flight for the shortest fight because I was working in Thailand, and I had bought some treasured front row seats, ringside seats, to see Mike Tyson fight Michael Spinks.
4:31 Speaker 01 And my, the schedule of the movie that I was working on was going over and over and over. And it was about to impinge on that day. And so I went to the director and I said, is it possible that you could shoot around me on Wednesday so that I can fly there, see the fight and get back? And he was able to do that. So I drove from Conchen Aubrey, Thailand to Bangkok, flew from Bangkok, I think I had to go to Tokyo on the flight I was on from Tokyo. I went to Paris, from Paris I went to New York. I drove into Manhattan. I picked up my then-wife and we drove out to Atlantic City. Fight lasted, what, a minute, 10 seconds, something like that?
5:15 Speaker 01 I got back in the car, dropped them off, I went back to the airport, flew back. So, yeah, and it was on that trip, it was one of the two times that I met Donald Trump.
5:24 Speaker 00 What was your, what was your impression?
5:26 Speaker 01 Salesman, seemed like, very brief, like hello. And then one, the other time, he was, he knew my younger brother. And my younger brother would sometimes go with him from New York City to Atlantic City on his helicopter.
5:42 Speaker 00 That's Chris?
5:43 Speaker 01 Go to the casinos, yeah.
5:45 Speaker 00 You've also commented about the, you know, Trump's appointed this, are they called the Hollywood ambassadors? And it's Stallone, John Voight and Mel Gibson.
5:57 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
5:58 Speaker 00 I don't, he called it a clown show.
6:02 Speaker 01 It seems to me that what he's looking for in everything, and I say this because of what he has said that he's looking for, is to control it all and to make sure that the messaging flatters and does not question him or, or his agendas. If any of them actually worked to do that, then I would be very critical of that. You know, they're, they're very talented men, actually. And some of them likeable.
6:38 Speaker 00 John Voight isn't likeable?
6:44 Speaker 01 No.
6:47 Speaker 01 John is challenging.
6:50 Speaker 01 He's a wonderful actor.
6:51 Speaker 00 He is. Is there, you said you got the vibe of a salesman. Is there, do you think he believes in anything?
6:59 Speaker 01 Say again.
7:00 Speaker 00 Does he believe in anything?
7:01 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't think that this is just a con job. I think, you know, there's, there's so much about President Trump. I mean, so much history where, you know, he says things that people say, oh, that's never gonna. He, he usually really thinks what he's saying, even if it's a lie. You know, he, he doesn't differentiate between a lie and the truth. It's all about what's gonna work for him.
7:30 Speaker 00 That's interesting, because he doesn't really care, really. It's about what's helpful or what makes him feel good.
7:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, the, the truth was yesterday.
7:39 Speaker 00 The truth isn't helpful, maybe, right?
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So, so you have, you know, alternate truths.
7:49 Speaker 01 So, what's gonna happen with it? I feel like if something is in the process of, something good is in the process of building itself, like a child and you're a parent, it's a good time to be quiet, let it build itself. Or if something is in the process of destroying itself, that perhaps should destroy itself, you sit back and be quiet, let it do it, and not distract from that program. And I'm feeling that things are going so far that no one with, let's say, an alternate view is going to stop any of it.
8:34 Speaker 01 No one is gonna be heard at all, right now. So just wait for it to get a little less loud. And, and I'm, so I'm thinking about that with his psychology, is not to even consider his psychology, but to just let it.
8:50 Speaker 01 Do its inevitable misfortune.
8:56 Speaker 00 There's something in the idea that, um, yeah, that its own logic will be self-destructive and that in triumph begins catastrophe, in a sense.
9:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, who gets hurt first after migrants in this country? It's going to be his base.
9:16 Speaker 00 The internal contradictions of the movement begin to be exposed.
9:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:21 Speaker 00 I imagine a lot of those federal employees who were being laid off voted for him.
9:25 Speaker 01 You can bet, yeah.
9:28 Speaker 00 Is there any part of the project that you see as a salutary injection of, I don't know, some kind of disruptive energy in an atmosphere that showed signs of becoming overly censorious and orthodox?
9:44 Speaker 01 Yes, I think that there's, you know, I'll look for the silver lining in anything. I think the advertisement of disruption that he was caught that and maybe people didn't pay enough or enough deep attention to a bad disruption. But our political leaders in particular, I think, equal failure on both sides for the last long period of time in moving towards where we are in the culture.
10:20 Speaker 00 Well, I sometimes wonder if people on the left underestimate him and there's this common conception that he's stupid, right? Which is hard to buy. I personally struggle with the idea that that's sufficient to explain what he is. He seems so smart.
10:32 Speaker 01 Well, I think that people will look back and see that he was extremely smart for his time and what it valued. But what he values is so base that I don't, I won't equate that with intelligence. It's truly void of soul and really, this is the other thing. It actively engages in cruelty often.
11:01 Speaker 01 And to watch that, you know, when we talk about whether it's what Elon Musk is doing now for him, with him, I don't know if there's any thought behind it at all, except to value destruction of things and people. And so I can't associate that with any intelligence that's going to do humankind any good.
11:23 Speaker 00 What does he value?
11:26 Speaker 01 His own instrument, reward system.
11:31 Speaker 00 The reward, what, to his ego and vanity?
11:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:35 Speaker 00 Not just financial?
11:36 Speaker 01 A tough guy who never was. He was his father's punk from Queens for a long time. You know, he was the tall Q-tip guy in school. He got into business, he got around a lot of real tough guys. Gangsters.
11:57 Speaker 00 Dodged conscription, cadet bone spurs.
12:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. And he found that he didn't have any of the complications of what I think you or I would associate with morality that would allow him to ride side saddle with real tough guys. That's what it seems like.
12:21 Speaker 00 Did it surprise you, because switching to Hollywood, did you see the movie The Apprentice?
12:26 Speaker 01 I did.
12:27 Speaker 00 What did you think?
12:28 Speaker 01 I thought it was exceptional. I really thought it was exceptional. It was a movie that got undernoticed, the actors were extraordinary.
12:40 Speaker 00 Jeremy Strong played?
12:41 Speaker 01 Roy Cohn.
12:43 Speaker 00 Roy Cohn, and Trump was played by?
12:45 Speaker 01 Sebastian Stan.
12:47 Speaker 00 Sebastian Stan, both excellent. And then it struggled to find distribution.
12:51 Speaker 01 Right.
12:52 Speaker 00 I, idiot that I am, thought, well, Hollywood's about money. If they think there's an audience, they'll release the movie. But it didn't seem to be that simple.
13:00 Speaker 01 Well, the film business is about money, which is not different than any other business. But, you know, you can watch how people do some longer projections. So, for example...
13:15 Speaker 01 There were about twenty films about the Ukraine war that were made at the same time that I made one, many of them exceptional. Almost none of them got distribution. Now, one would have thought that would have been a very timely thing and that documentaries, you know, are of great interest and get, you know, the opportunity of great distribution is there because of the new streaming and all of that. But those companies were not buying that kind of thing because they, Russia represents a lot of money to them down the line.
13:55 Speaker 01 But the group mentality of it, what happens, let's say, when an actor, a famous actor internationally and filmmaker, who is actually living the greatest theme, you know, the hero's journey, that is what they want to make all these movies about.
14:15 Speaker 00 You're talking about Zelensky?
14:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. When he offers to come and talk about the power of movies at the moment that he's among the most famous men in the world, and I was asked to be the conduit to the Academy to let him speak. This is in twenty-two.
14:38 Speaker 00 At the Oscars.
14:40 Speaker 01 Not a political statement, a film about the power of filmmaking. And they traded that for Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, you know, it was, it just, there's a pervasive cowardice that's just much louder in our business because our business is face forward, right? So it's upsetting.
15:02 Speaker 00 I'm going to be really literal. How does that relate to Chris Rock being slapped? Maybe emotionally, internally, if it had, if the event had been imbued with a gravitas, you know, that Zelensky would have brought somehow...
15:18 Speaker 01 That wouldn't have happened.
15:19 Speaker 00 It wouldn't have happened, right?
15:20 Speaker 01 Right, no.
15:21 Speaker 00 The occasion would have felt different.
15:23 Speaker 01 That's right. And what a good thing for that occasion to feel, you know, to have some kind of weight and pride in itself because there's so much, there is, there's a lot for people to be proud of in film. This year was, you know, there were some great films and... And some that were kind of miracles, given where things are in film today. Miracles that they got made, as well as how well-made that they were. You know, so you keep seeing these little squeaks of hope.
15:55 Speaker 00 Maybe this is too big a thing to open up. Let's talk about Zelensky for a second. So, congratulations on your documentary. I guess it's a year or two ago now that that came out, is that right? It was Vice Studios made, it's called Superpower?
16:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:09 Speaker 00 You had access to Zelensky, you made several, maybe five trips over there for the film?
16:13 Speaker 01 Eight total. I don't know how it made sense with the camera, but yeah.
16:17 Speaker 00 I mean, maybe it's worth talking about how you came to make it, because it felt as though you were hunting for a subject for a while, right? You'd been, you'd spent a bit of time, you'd spent a bit of time with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, but this was when you were kind of curious about the fact that he'd survived the Arab Spring.
16:37 Speaker 01 Right.
16:38 Speaker 00 You chilled with him at his place.
16:40 Speaker 01 Well, let's be careful here. What I did, so I went to meet with him. And the idea was, there were two things, because the war was very active, and I wanted to know that we would not be restrained or monitored, in the sense of, I wanted to talk to what had been known as opposition journalists. I wanted to speak to ISIS prisoners, I wanted to be able to stop on the street and go talk to the average person.
17:19 Speaker 01 I wanted kind of full access and freedom to do that without a minder. And he was absolutely, "We have nothing to hide," so on. And then he said that his wife had made lunch, and that we should go to lunch, and so we went. And I got into his car, and he drove, and it was a small economy car.
17:49 Speaker 01 And we went to the house, no sign of security of any kind. He's there with his wife and his children. His children are as western as any California kid. They're listening to Kanye and dancing around and come to lunch. And then, bit by bit, the gatekeepers, as we were progressing in the idea of going there to shoot this documentary, they were closing in and all of a sudden, we didn't have access to this and we weren't going to have access to that. And we realized this had been a kind of bait and switch and decided not to make it. So, leading to the Zelensky question.
18:29 Speaker 00 So, you basically, okay, so the thing I wanted to reflect, which I'd always known, but kind of brought home with more force, was the fact that Zelensky's prehistory was as a comedian, actor, producer, director. He was like, it wasn't just a side hustle, like that was what he was and that was the basis and the foundation for his popularity. And then, you know, with the following, not just in Ukraine, but in Russia, like he was very, very beloved and admired. And that then, he kind of, when the moment came, there was this sort of sense of disillusionment post-Maidan with Poroshenko.
19:10 Speaker 00 And that specifically, Poroshenko had been, I guess, anti-Russia.
19:15 Speaker 01 Right.
19:16 Speaker 00 And in a sense, Zelensky was less hawkish against Russia. He was seen as a more of a centrist figure, like, not to say accommodationist, but it was like, well, we can make peace, like, we don't have to have a continued conflict in the East among these supposed separatists. Anyway, there's a lot to be said about that. But what took you there initially, pre the invasion, was what? The fact that he was this mysterious?
19:43 Speaker 01 Well, the funny thing is that, you know, this other documentary that we were going to do, it was, it was pretty elaborate and it had required a lot of travel and we had...
19:55 Speaker 00 For the, for the Zelensky project?
19:56 Speaker 01 No, for the Syria project.
19:58 Speaker 00 For the Syria project.
19:59 Speaker 01 Right. So...
20:03 Speaker 01 It was kind of heavy.
20:05 Speaker 00 Well, what was, when you say it was heavy, what do you mean?
20:07 Speaker 01 It was just a story at the heart of death. It was this kind of, you know, when you're covering something or, you know, as a documentarian, and I say this as though I've done a lot of it, I had, made one. You know, where I, let's say, a different kind of, well, the kind of documentarians who I appreciate a lot, I can't do what they do. I'm not, I'm not good at, I can't do what you do. Like, I'll watch you, the way you are when you go into these places and these cultures, and it's extraordinary. You have your way, which is particularly interesting to watch. And so if the story doesn't go the way you want it to go, meaning I've got total freedom, then maybe I'll make it about how I don't have freedom.
20:53 Speaker 01 Maybe I'll make it about how these Scientologists are trying to tell me to get off a public road, right? I, I need the trust of the people I'm gonna make it about, and I, and I'm trustworthy. I'm not gonna be cynical, I'm not gonna be, and, but I'm going to tell, you know, you told me not, not in the hide, so I can say what I saw, right? When it wasn't that, it's sort of like, well, maybe I, you know, I'm not gonna be able to get the trust of this, for this story. And then, when my producing partner, Billy Smith, he had met somebody that had a connection to Zelensky.
21:30 Speaker 01 And at that point, it was this whimsical story about this comedian, this comic actor turned, who played a president in a successful comedy series, becoming the president. And it'll be interesting to learn about Ukraine for me. And then it became this because Putin started sending these troops to the east, and, and, you know, bit by bit, all of the analysts were saying, this is looking like he's gonna invade Ukraine, and now we had a very different documentary that we were making. But that wasn't the intention, that wasn't what, you know, when we went into it.
22:16 Speaker 00 I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Zelensky visit, right? And that piece of political theatre and how it went down. What was your characterisation of what happened when he's sitting there in front of the reporters with Trump and Vance?
22:32 Speaker 01 My first characterisation of it is it is such a sensitive moment that I want to be very careful not to mischaracterise it.
22:43 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
22:45 Speaker 01 The idea that you ask a head of state to come to the United States, he makes that trip to come to the United States to meet with you on matters of life and death. And the only opportunity he has to negotiate that with you is in front of cameras, that's what you do to him. It's kind of surprising, but not. And so it's what it was.
23:11 Speaker 00 What happened was, correct me if I'm wrong, Trump saying, well, we're going to pursue a ceasefire. And then Zelensky sort of saying, well, we have to, these people only understand force, right? Is that what went down? And then Trump's like, you haven't got a card to play.
23:27 Speaker 01 Here's the thing. Nowhere, I didn't see any other reporting about Zelensky's position going into that meeting, other than that he needed security guarantees as one of the absolutes. And security guarantees is a very, very different thing than security assurances. And no one in that part of the world that I met, no matter what side they're on or the way they think, no one believes he's going to stop with Ukraine, none of them. You know, high to low, it's an absolute that he would not stop with Ukraine.
24:08 Speaker 00 Meaning what, that he would then go on to do what?
24:10 Speaker 01 Expansion, whether it's Lithuania, Moldova, Poland. This is, this guy is hell-bent in this way. And by the way, you know, this expansionism isn't always armies going across borders, right? It can just be having a puppet president, as he once upon a time did have in Ukraine.
24:36 Speaker 00 Right. And which he does have in Chechnya, right, and Belarus, I think.
24:41 Speaker 01 Georgia.
24:42 Speaker 00 Georgia. In your documentary, Superpower, there's a brief sequence of you from like 2001, maybe? With Nicholson, I think, in Moscow, hanging with Putin.
24:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, yeah, yeah.
24:59 Speaker 00 Seemingly at dinner together, but you don't say anything about it.
25:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I said what I said. Yeah, I said something about what it feels like now to look back on it. It's like you want to take a shower or something. It was the Moscow Film Festival, and Jack and I had a movie that we'd done together that was at the festival. And the creative director of the festival, Nikita Mikhailov, whose father had written the national anthem for Stalin,
25:34 Speaker 01 he threw a kind of festival party at his zahra. And so a lot of people went out to this thing, and Putin, we knew Putin was going to come.
25:47 Speaker 01 And Putin arrives, Jack and I are seated right where he is, at a long, long table. And immediately to his left is the father, because this is an honored Russian, right?
26:05 Speaker 01 And Putin is sort of the focus of the whole table, you know? Everybody's, this is about two weeks after President Bush had met with him and said the famous thing about, you know, I looked him in the eye and trust, you know, knew I could trust him.
26:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, he was considered a kind of a reformer at this time.
26:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, he was clever about how he presented himself. And I remember him being clever about how he presented himself. And I would have accused myself of sharing that thought with George Bush, probably, at that moment.
26:35 Speaker 01 So then, there's a little break in the conversation. Because, you know, this is a table of twenty people. Everyone wants to be engaged with the guy that's here. He's mostly interested in talking to Jack. Talking to me a little bit. We talked about kids, things like that.
26:53 Speaker 00 You and Putin did?
26:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:55 Speaker 00 Okay.
26:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. I asked him how old his kids were, what are they into. And then, there's a little lull. And in that little lull, the old man leans over to Putin and is whispering. And Jack sees it. Of course, the whole table is immediately, what's that about? And Jack says, "He's telling them, don't change the anthem."
27:27 Speaker 00 Is he pretty good with the one-liners, Jack?
27:31 Speaker 01 I'm with him in front of a pizza place one time in Westwood. And there was a Bullocks next door. And a very extraordinarily healthy young woman comes out of that store. Extraordinarily healthy.
27:51 Speaker 01 And floats in her high heels by us. And without missing a beat, Jack says, "Something about North American nutrition, Johnny."
28:06 Speaker 01 But I'm saving the best for last. The best was, we were shooting in Long Beach. And after finishing work, going to the hotel, he went to his room, got a shower, I got a shower. And we go downstairs to get a drink. And we did both happen to notice this one girl drifting, you know, through the dance floor and as, you know, being, you know, attractive. I could tell, like, I don't think we said anything about it, I think we just saw. And then I noticed that the girl was now staring at him in a very friendly way.
28:45 Speaker 01 And she went up to him and she says, "Excuse me, Mr. Nicholson, would you like to dance?" And he says, "Wrong verb."
28:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's fast.
29:01 Speaker 00 Oh, that's pretty good.
29:04 Speaker 00 You like his acting?
29:06 Speaker 01 Hmm?
29:06 Speaker 00 Nicholson.
29:07 Speaker 01 I think he's a great, great actor. The Cuckoo's Nest, I don't think there's been, there's no such thing as a better performance than that in, in the history of film. It's, it's one of the handful of
29:21 Speaker 01 greatest thing you've ever seen. And I think that what he had at best is everything that one would love to see in a movie star.
29:33 Speaker 01 And everything that everyone loved to see in an actor, he had them both going in full tilt. And yeah, so he's so exciting to watch.
29:43 Speaker 00 There's a thing about Nicholson as well, I can't do Nicholson, but where he talks about when he was, he started losing his hair quite young. And then people with full heads of hair said, Jack, you're losing your hair. And 20 years later, they're all bald and I'm still losing my hair.
29:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. That's right. He just kept that hairline forever.
30:01 Speaker 00 Kind of amazing.
30:26 Speaker 00 I want to, okay, who else do you like acting wise? I read that, um, that for you, Robert De Niro was maybe iconic at a time when you were coming up.
30:34 Speaker 01 Oh, no question. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he's, I remember in addition to being a devoted fan when I was it was when I was in acting school that, well, no, it was earlier than that that I started paying attention. But then, once I started to Understand what the challenges of the job were, then I really appreciated what he was doing. And it was also a respect for the work that, you know, I think it's a really noble profession if somebody who's doing it takes it as a noble profession, right?
31:11 Speaker 01 And he, his discipline with it is, the excellence that he was demanding was really influential, you know, and exciting.
31:25 Speaker 00 You think some actors don't take it as a noble profession?
31:28 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. And some of them have every right to not because they don't have, you know, some don't have very noble talents or interests in what they're doing it for.
31:41 Speaker 00 And, right, maybe, or products, whatever, projects that they've been recruited for, maybe more because it drives the algorithm, you know what I mean? Or do you think you can bring art to anything?
31:52 Speaker 01 Well, look, it took me a long time to start, I'm a real Luddite, and so I would have been intimidated for years to try to believe I could understand how to access a streamer. You know, I just heard the word streaming, I didn't understand it. I knew that, you know, I stopped thinking movie posters were interesting as soon as they had a computer code on them. I just didn't, all the technology was putting me off. But anyway, I got over that enough where now I, you know, will watch things, I'll even be a binge watcher on some stuff. There are some things that are on television that are so excellent.
32:37 Speaker 01 The actors are brilliant. On the level with anything, you know, that came out of the great cinema of the 70s, and really on that level, but you're not finding it too often in the movie theaters, but you can find it if you pick your spots.
32:53 Speaker 00 Anything specific?
32:54 Speaker 01 Hmm? So I was sort of compelled to watch, someone who's a fan of Euphoria.
33:04 Speaker 01 And it's very talented and people are so dark in ways that I didn't understand what we were getting out of it. And then I watched and I got to what it's gonna be episode five, season two. And from there to the end, I think, I think it would be snobby and unwise to say it's not every bit as good as Long Day's Journey and Tonight. There's genius stuff happening. So this stuff, I don't know how they do it. I don't know how these guys do these very long form things. It's not, you know, it's something I think I have a lot of skills to apply to it.
33:49 Speaker 01 But the actor's great and yeah, so but no, just picking one out of, there's also this one, you know about this show Normal People?
34:00 Speaker 00 The Sally Rooney novel with Paul Meskell?
34:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
34:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:06 Speaker 00 And Daisy Edgar Jones.
34:07 Speaker 01 Great.
34:08 Speaker 00 That was terrific.
34:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:10 Speaker 00 So simple in one way.
34:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:12 Speaker 00 Simple love story. It's not like particularly pegged to now, you know what I mean? It's not like social media is a big thing in it or it's just a love story kind of between a jock and a geek, a complicated nerd woman. I don't, that's a bit reductive, is it? Sensitive jock.
34:28 Speaker 01 But enough about Elon Musk.
34:31 Speaker 00 Yeah. And they're both so good in it. Have you met Musk?
34:36 Speaker 01 Perfect.
34:37 Speaker 00 Have you met Musk? Have you met Elon Musk?
34:39 Speaker 01 That's me driving, look behind me.
34:42 Speaker 00 There he is. People in radio land were looking at a photo on the wall of Sean's man cave, human cave. So you were tight with him for a while?
34:52 Speaker 01 No, I wouldn't, no, no. I've met him on several occasions, chatted with him on some occasions. One time I went and he generously showed me a lot about their space project and talked for several hours about that. And that's about the totality of what, how I know him.
35:15 Speaker 00 Did you feel you got a read of him?
35:17 Speaker 01 Here's what I, here's what I, where I put him.
35:22 Speaker 01 What the ultimate value of his existence on earth is going to be or not be, I'm not going to be alive to know, right? Cures to cancer, his role in AI, all of these things are going way bigger and faster than I can pretend to conceive. And so I just don't think about him that much as an individual. I see him more as most of a lot of destructive energy and a lot of stuff that may end up being very productive for other generations.
35:58 Speaker 00 I think you're probably not on social media that much.
36:03 Speaker 00 One theory is that he kind of got poisoned by the internet, right? Like he got so saturated in Twitter, which became X, that he kind of almost self-brainwashed in some respect.
36:18 Speaker 01 You know, I think it's fair to say that
36:22 Speaker 01 if you are a prematurely balding teenager,
36:29 Speaker 01 white, in apartheid South Africa, who has no social skills.
36:34 Speaker 00 Right. Not to mention the parental stuff, like his...
36:37 Speaker 01 There's also the narcissism issue that goes through the family. But these are the guys we've got.
36:47 Speaker 00 We were talking about, you were talking about coming up, people, actors who give themselves completely to the work, learning the craft. I read a quote where you said that you were looking for something that you could give yourself 100% to, right?
37:06 Speaker 01 Well, I think that we...
37:07 Speaker 00 Or consecrate yourself to.
37:09 Speaker 01 I grew up in a funny time in America in the sense that we were direct lineage to people who served. Now, in that case, it was the military, right? My father in World War II and so on.
37:28 Speaker 00 He was a pilot, right?
37:30 Speaker 01 He was a gunner. He was a gunner and a bombardier. And then we, you know, as a kid, I'm growing up and draft is a really bad word, right? So there was nothing demanding, either culturally or legally,
37:48 Speaker 01 my generation to serve anything.
37:51 Speaker 01 So I think that without that, I was left to my own immature pursuits. And I wanted something to connect the individual that I was and was becoming with the group need, right? And to feel like you could be part of something bigger. And I ultimately did find that in movies in a way.
38:25 Speaker 00 You'd grown up, you were in the San Fernando Valley, and then as a child, your parents moved to Malibu, right? And your dad, he'd been a director. Your mom was an actor. And reading about your upbringing, you know, you spoke only ever lovingly and respectfully about your parents. Nevertheless, there was also a quote of yours I read where you said, "I'm damaged." And in the New Yorker profile, there was some guy, a friend of yours, who was speculating on the idea that your mom had been quite hard on you and that you may be carrying some of that with you. Is there anything in that?
39:10 Speaker 01 No. Well, here's what I'm carrying with me. My mom and I were equally hard on each other. Never, for two days in a row. People loved her and they feared her. You know, she was unfiltered, opinionated. It was like that. You know, if anything, she was the first one that just thought her kids did everything great, right? So she wasn't like hard on me in that sense that I hear from kids. I was very lucky that way, very encouraging parents. But my mother-
39:48 Speaker 00 But hey, I got to say, because there's a whole quote about how when you did your first performance-
39:52 Speaker 01 Well, this is, but see, I always appreciated that about her because if it wasn't meaning, if it was meaningful, it usually was because I agreed with her on something that she suggested. When I didn't agree with her, I was able to be what my friends were, which was kind of, as long as they were 10 feet away, they thought it was, she was a character, really. In fact, my older brother and I- And we felt that my mother would have loved this. But we understand that a gravestone is an appreciation that is shared by friends and relatives at large. We wanted to put, you know, mother, wife, all that stuff that we wanted that gravestone
40:37 Speaker 01 to say, "A piece of work." Because she was, she was, so yes, when I was, I did my first play, her first words after the show, "That was terrible." And then told me, "I really have to go to college and have something to fall back on."
40:57 Speaker 00 But you appreciated that?
40:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I just, because, you know, I don't know, because of the other ways, my parents clearly had allowed me to have a real sense of confidence. And I just thought, "Well, she's wrong." You know, I've had, over the years, I've done a fair amount of time sitting across from a shrink. And for the first, let me say, 20 years of such opportunities, it was always compulsory, either by a court or by a wife or something like that. And I just didn't see the value in it.
41:39 Speaker 01 And I always felt smarter than the person I was talking to. And then later in life, I found some very intelligent people that were helpful in certain things that I was dealing with and so on. And so I went back through it and I realized that one of the things that's baffled most of them, they've all looked for, it's a big thing, this trauma thing, right? In fact, I would say that similar, that like the Me Too movement, you know, there's, it was the Me Too industry. The actual things are very real things and so
42:22 Speaker 01 we we attach trauma to too many things, I think. And should save them for the ones that really are there. But anyway, they were always looking for trauma in my childhood. And they'll they even define it by capital T and little t. And there's just nothing attached to my parents like that. Now, dude, have I had trauma? Yeah, I made it all myself after the age of 21.
42:54 Speaker 00 The trouble that you've got into specifically, it felt like in the, this is going back. Eighty, in the eighties, you know, you had a reputation for punching photographers. That became the sort of the tabloid shorthand for a bit.
43:08 Speaker 01 Well, they were there for the ones that were photographers with cameras. So those were recorded. It wasn't just photographers.
43:16 Speaker 00 There was, I want to dig one up. Okay, here we go. This might, there was a few good profiles of you. The Rolling Stone one was pretty funny. That was from 96. Penn has had his share of run ins with the police. In Macau in 1986, during the shooting of Shanghai Surprise, he was arrested for helping to deter an intruding paparazzo by hanging him by his ankles from the ninth, the ninth floor balcony of his hotel room. Penn subsequently broke out of the jail where he was being held on the charges of attempted murder and escaped the country by jet foil.
43:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, did not hang him by his ankles. We were not gonna throw him over the balcony. We wanted to stop what was happening. Initially, we didn't know it was camera that he was holding. He jumped out and he was in a corridor. There were two security guys, walking myself and a friend of mine up into this hotel. We were ahead of them. And here was a door here. And they had presentationally, the hotel had two doors to this room they were giving me. Very nice room. But we're walking and there was a door just opposite that. And just as I'm starting to see this open door, somebody jumps out. And they have something.
44:30 Speaker 01 So we did both grab him and we charged him right through the room to the balcony that was also presentationally open. It was very conveniently a beeline. And cutting him off here, bending him over. And by that time I had seen, well, let's say within the first second and a half, I noticed it was a camera. And I was actually telling this other guy, you know, it's just, it's a camera. It's a camera, like, like we should let him go. But we never had a chance to pull him back before the security guys came and pulled us back. So they said that it was, yeah, attempted murder. And so they put us in a, literally, you know, Barney Fife's jail.
45:13 Speaker 01 And I'm looking around this cell, I'm thinking, okay, this, wait, is there anybody out there? You know, there were people that knew we were there because I was working on a thing. So, but that could be ours. Do I get a phone call? Do I get anything? Then we noticed that when they left, they only had one guy. You know, like if you go to a village on a Sunday, anywhere in the world and there's a little police huddle, you know, it's, there's one guy, right? And this guy was not youthful. And the knob that locks the gate, I could see it actually had grinder facing. At some point, they lost a key or something and they ground through it. Meaning it was open.
45:58 Speaker 01 All you had to do is give it a little push. And we knew, because it wasn't far to this hotel. It was just one road that had taken us from the jet foil launch to the hotel in the first place. So even though we were, I mean, I'd just stepped foot in Macau. I didn't know anything, but I knew how to get to the jet foil. So we just bolted. And then we went to the Kowloon's when we got to Hong Kong.
46:27 Speaker 00 Did the cop not come after you?
46:29 Speaker 01 Didn't look back. We just bolted and ran straight to the jet foil and they would leave.
46:35 Speaker 00 What is a jet foil?
46:36 Speaker 01 It's those like float boats that take you back and forth to Hong Kong.
46:40 Speaker 00 It was Shanghai Surprise, we said that. That's you were in with Madonna, right?
46:45 Speaker 01 We have to, because that might have been my greatest crime.
46:48 Speaker 00 The one they didn't get.
46:49 Speaker 01 The movie itself, but it will damage you if you say it.
46:55 Speaker 00 It got terrible reviews, didn't it?
46:56 Speaker 01 It deserved worse. So, so, and then ultimately, it was the gangsters that negotiated the thing. I don't think anybody in government had anything to say about it.
47:10 Speaker 00 What was your most serious case that you caught over the years?
47:14 Speaker 01 Well, that would have been if it had gone.
47:16 Speaker 00 Right, attempted murder.
47:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:20 Speaker 00 You did thirty-three days in jail?
47:23 Speaker 01 Thirty-four, yeah, yeah. It was a sixty, a sixty day sentence, so you'd get, and you'd get a good day for a good day. And if you have any infractions, that's another day. So I had four infractions over the thirty days and got thirty-four days. But let's see, that, I guess, you know, it just dumb, just dumb fights and things like that.
47:43 Speaker 00 Was that for punching a photographer?
47:45 Speaker 01 No, it was, it was actually, yes and no. It was, it was a bad, it was a bad month. I, I was on a movie set and I got into a scuffle with an extra. Now, that case, I was likely to beat because he had some damage, but he was big. And I was not, and.
48:11 Speaker 00 What was it over?
48:14 Speaker 01 He was secretly taking pictures in the frame while we're in the middle of a take. And I went to interact with him. It got nasty and then it became something else. And I went out to dinner the night before I'm going before the judge. And I got into a fight and I used a chair. I, there's no excuse for this. I mean, I hit him and he, he, he went down. I grabbed the chair and when I grabbed the chair and hit him again when he was down, that was assault with a deadly weapon. So that's the worst charge. And so guess what? Same judge.
48:59 Speaker 01 So now we said, okay, I'm going to jail. I know, I know, I know. So we just had to make the best deal we could. And that was 60 days and cut it down to 34.
49:10 Speaker 00 Did you just, did you go to a dark place? Has that happened often? Was that like, what is that all about?
49:17 Speaker 01 Immaturity, some kind of bravado behavior tied in with some justice seeking, you know, and kind of misplaced sense of how that works. But, you know, I never deserved to hit anybody, but a lot of the guys that got hit deserved to get hit. I did feel that. And by the way, I have to make it very clear. Even then, I lost a lot more of these engagements than I, than I was successful in.
50:00 Speaker 01 Successful to the point of going to jail. And I know, and I also, you know, I do think that the average person would see it a little differently. This is again, not excusing anything, but.
50:16 Speaker 01 Take the, like with the paparazzi, for example, you know, if you take the camera out of their hand, and you just close your eyes and you just think of, pick a person that you can imagine, that you don't want in your life, and they follow you everywhere, and they're looking through your windows at your house, all day, every day, and the police won't do anything about it, can't do anything about it, because they're on public property, and god forbid you're on public property. What do you do?
50:49 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, at some point, I might kill them. I'll do anything to stop it. So I did feel a little of that at that time.
51:03 Speaker 01 You know, I'm not gonna live life this way, with this person attached to me.
51:06 Speaker 00 I bet it didn't help, though, did it? It's not like, or would they, would they give you a wider berth, once it was clear that you might combust?
51:13 Speaker 01 I, I think it probably added bad, bad shit to the culture. By doing that, it gave them more, you know, added to the idea, you can go provoke people like this idiot.
51:23 Speaker 00 And that was the narrative, Sean Penn explodes at the paparazzi again today.
51:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm probably, partially responsible for this explosion that led to all this extreme creepy fascination with famous people and things like that. And it, and so, yeah, no, it didn't do, no, no good cam of it, for sure.
51:44 Speaker 00 Do you think you were slightly caught in the backwash of the obsession with Madonna as well? That's part of it, right?
51:52 Speaker 01 Oh, well, that's most of what got the amount of attention that was happening. I mean, I, my life was much simpler before that, but when we met, she had never gone on tour. You know, she was at the beginning of the, of the whole thing, and...
52:10 Speaker 00 Would it be 82? "Like a Virgin" was 83, I think.
52:14 Speaker 01 The song had come out, and the video, so she was, you know, but it wasn't like it got. But she became a lightning rod of attention, and I was there.
52:28 Speaker 00 How did you meet?
52:31 Speaker 01 A friend of mine was a P A on a music video she was doing like four blocks away from where I was staying in town at that time. I was staying at a friend's house, developing a movie. And we would work on the script during the day and I got up and then when we have lunch, because MTV was a big thing at that time, we would put on MTV. So I was familiar with her from that. And then this friend of mine is down the street making another video that she's doing and says, "Oh, come down, Madonna wants to meet you." Yeah, and then, yeah, so we met there.
53:13 Speaker 00 You just skipped a track?
53:17 Speaker 01 Well, the only thing, you know, I don't like, you know, if I have a cute story to tell about somebody, I'm still telling a story they don't hear to permit me to tell, you know? It becomes kiss and tell after that, I don't want to go there.
53:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. Did you see the documentary they made about her?
53:39 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about that, yep.
53:42 Speaker 00 And then they ask her, like, "Who's the love of your life?" Do you remember that?
53:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I remember that, yeah, I remember that.
53:49 Speaker 00 You remember what she said?
53:50 Speaker 01 I do, I remember what she said, she's very sweet. Look, she's been a good friend for a lot of years. It didn't take us long to realize that we had mistaken a good first date for a wedding partner. And it didn't take us long to recover after we got divorced, you know, maybe a year in friendship, you know, so. I have a lot of fond memories of it. It's not all jail and, well, there's a lot of alcohol, she'd be fairly accusing me of that.
54:28 Speaker 00 How's your energy? You okay to keep going a little bit?
54:33 Speaker 01 My energy's fine.
54:34 Speaker 00 Okay, great. I feel like we slightly, we got Zelensky somewhat on pause, but I also wanted to ask about, I mean, there's a lot of things to touch on, but El Chapo. Notorious, what do they, narco, what do they call them?
54:53 Speaker 01 Narco traffickers.
54:54 Speaker 00 Narco trafficker, El Chapo Guzman.
54:56 Speaker 01 Kingpin.
54:57 Speaker 00 And you, you spent some FaceTime with him.
54:59 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
55:03 Speaker 00 I looked at the interview, it's still on, there's a video of, of an interview with him on YouTube.
55:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, that, it's.
55:10 Speaker 00 That's, I guess, part of it, right?
55:12 Speaker 01 Well, when it, so I had hoped to do an interview with him. That's what I went there to do.
55:18 Speaker 00 Barone Stone.
55:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. I have to counter some of the, the criticisms that came. Now, it is true that I am verbose with these pieces, they're long. And if you don't like the writing style, it's, it's long and, and you don't like it. But an example would be, you know, that we thought we were outsmarting people, you know, to be able to go down there without being known or anything. I had said in the article, and I, and I always thought that no matter what we did, and we were using burner phones and everything, you know, I'm talking about the little group that was gonna go.
56:01 Speaker 01 You know, there's a trail on this stuff, if, you know, when it comes to that guy. Mm-hmm.
56:07 Speaker 01 Even if you wanna make the argument that for whatever nefarious reasons, governments were not wanting to grab him at given times, they sure as hell wanted to know where he was and who was talking to him and why. So.
56:20 Speaker 00 We should say that he was on the lam, right? He'd escaped from, he'd been apprehended, having been the head of a cartel, which cartel was it?
56:26 Speaker 01 Sinola.
56:28 Speaker 00 And then they got him, and then he was sprung from jail. So by the time you catch up with him, he's an escapee, living in a hideout somewhere, right?
56:35 Speaker 01 He was living out in the jungle, yeah.
56:38 Speaker 00 The shit that those cartels got up to was unreal, right? I mean, the level of almost pornographic violence, decapitations.
56:45 Speaker 01 I wouldn't use the word almost, yeah.
56:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, horrific acts of terroristic violence, mass beheadings. And what was your curiosity about him? What was the, what was your, what was leading you to want to make?
57:02 Speaker 01 If I had an agenda, it would have been to try to understand how you get this way and how, what's the solution here? Is there one? There'd not been a lot of, not been a lot of front page news about these problems. And I do understand that because I understand Mexico's reaction, you know, when I, to this thing that happened when I went down there. Because, you know, having worked in Haiti, you do understand the incredible importance of foreign investment. And of course, Mexico had, you know, figured out how to not have all the focus be on that at that time, you know, because they're trying to represent security for businesses that
57:47 Speaker 01 are coming in. Okay, I get that, but, but I also noticed that this, this situation isn't changing, it's getting worse. And so I had a fluke thing happen that I knew somebody that could get me with him. I said I wanted to do that, and these other people wanted to make a movie about him. I didn't want to do that. So I was gonna write this piece for Rolling Stone with hopes of an interview, but there wasn't an interview. What happened is it went down, takes us forever to get there, and there he is.
58:25 Speaker 01 And it was kinda later at night, and they had set up like a picnic table and put some string lights up, had some local peasants cooking some food, and we sat and ate and drank and talked, and it went on for about eight hours. Most of the conversation I had with him was, I was being asked to chime in about their movie idea. You know, because he, he was, he wasn't very interested in me, he was interested in this woman that was with us.
59:02 Speaker 00 A director?
59:03 Speaker 01 No, no, she was an actress, and she was gonna take advantage of this opportunity to make a movie about him. So all of this was what was kind of in the mix. And tell her what I wanted to do. He says, he said, I just met you. I don't know you.
59:18 Speaker 00 Any signs of recognition of you?
59:22 Speaker 01 No, he'd been told who I was. I think he'd gone along with anything she wanted to do. And so she vouched for me, but I didn't know in what ways. So ultimately, the girl finally got him to go on tape. He answered some of the questions a little bit.
59:47 Speaker 00 He answers all of them very blandly.
59:50 Speaker 01 But most of them he didn't answer.
59:52 Speaker 00 OK.
59:53 Speaker 01 And.
59:54 Speaker 00 The ones on the video he answers, but.
59:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, because they've decided which ones he's gonna.
59:59 Speaker 00 OK, something they didn't put to him.
1:00:00 Speaker 01 It's just he and one of his guys.
1:00:01 Speaker 00 The questions are pretty good.
1:00:03 Speaker 01 Well, it became a story, you know, of, OK, this is the supply side now, whatever, and so on. That was the whole deal. That was, that's, that's what it was.
1:00:19 Speaker 00 I don't want to take up too much of your time. Maybe it's worth circling back because, you know, one of the striking things is, you know, you're a gifted actor. You've been referred to numerous times as maybe the most gifted actor of your generation. Just gonna let that sink in.
1:00:38 Speaker 01 In, in American English speaking movies that sometimes said about me as well as some others, it's been appreciated.
1:00:44 Speaker 00 Who else is up there with you, Izzy? Who, who would you regard as your peers at that level? You started out in taps, Tom Cruise. Do you keep up with Tom?
1:00:54 Speaker 01 I don't keep up with him, but I have a very friendly relationship with him when I see him.
1:00:59 Speaker 00 Does he ever talk to you about Scientology?
1:01:01 Speaker 01 No, uh-uh, never has, no.
1:01:05 Speaker 00 You're not supposed to. You're supposed to, it's a, it's an axiom that you don't really preach it. You like, you say that, oh, you should read the books.
1:01:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I have a sense that those who go through that celebrity center have a very different experience with Scientology than the rank and file.
1:01:20 Speaker 00 I think that's true. I think it's pretty nice. It's like flying first class. It's hard to go back.
1:01:25 Speaker 01 And maybe you haven't seen outside that bubble.
1:01:29 Speaker 01 But about Tom Cruise, when we were talking about acting, like, he is a guy pursues excellence on a very high level. Now, I understand, you know, certain kinds of movies people appreciate more than other kinds of movies and this and this, you know, there's, but this is a very good actor who's also an extraordinarily committed craftsman. Those movies don't get made on that level, whether you love them or they're not your cup of tea, they don't get made on that level without somebody extraordinary behind it. And he's, he's the common link between too many of them for it not to be him.
1:02:10 Speaker 00 It's not an accident.
1:02:11 Speaker 01 It's no accident, yeah. He's also, he's probably, you know, everyone talks, he does his own stunts, he does his own stunts, he's probably the best stunt man in the movie world. He's probably, you know, when it comes to the amount of skills he has and what he can do with them, and maybe the most experienced in things because he's, they're choreographing things for him to do that nobody's ever been able to afford to put another stunt man to the test on. So he's probably advanced the whole, you know, that whole thing. He's pretty amazing.
1:02:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, apologies to the stunt people out there listening for Sean saying that Tom Cruise is better than all of you.
1:02:49 Speaker 01 I, I would like to think they probably celebrate a guy like that. He, you know, just makes the whole genre that is the most demanding of those skills, you know, create more jobs. I'm sure he's had some very good training from exceptional stunt people as well. But, you know, this whole thing about like the best actors in the world and although it's, like I was saying earlier, I think I'm seeing the, or who do I consider a peer? Peer? I'm seeing performances, I mean, some young actors.
1:03:26 Speaker 01 Well, I feel like I should quit and become an accountant. They're so good, you know, and.
1:03:31 Speaker 00 Go on, who, Chalamet?
1:03:33 Speaker 01 I haven't, I haven't seen that movie yet.
1:03:35 Speaker 00 Which one, there's so many.
1:03:37 Speaker 01 Oh, I actually haven't seen his movies yet.
1:03:40 Speaker 00 The Dylan one?
1:03:41 Speaker 01 No, I haven't seen it yet.
1:03:43 Speaker 00 You're speaking as the voice of Bob Dylan, because you read his audiobook, didn't you?
1:03:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I'm about to do the second one, actually.
1:03:49 Speaker 00 What is, has he got a new one out?
1:03:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, Chronicles Two.
1:03:51 Speaker 00 Have you read it?
1:03:52 Speaker 01 No, I wait until I record it.
1:03:54 Speaker 00 Really?
1:03:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:55 Speaker 00 It's such a good book, right? The first one, I loved it.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 I think it's terrific, yeah.
1:04:00 Speaker 00 I read it, I didn't listen to you. Maybe I should listen to your version.
1:04:03 Speaker 01 Well, you already know the material, so I don't think you move on. There's other things to do. But Warren Beatty speaks about this very, much smarter than I can, but you know, there's no really such thing as a movie star anymore, right? That's, that's kind of, it's, it's just this gigantic library. Here, I'll give you an example. Game of Thrones. Of course, I know about Game of Thrones. I know it was huge success.
1:04:27 Speaker 00 So they tell me.
1:04:28 Speaker 01 I just didn't see it.
1:04:29 Speaker 00 And me neither.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 So.
1:04:30 Speaker 00 Who needs to see it? It's like dragons.
1:04:32 Speaker 01 I don't.
1:04:32 Speaker 00 We will wench on the morrow.
1:04:34 Speaker 01 It's not my. But, but meanwhile, I was at a function and some people from Game of Thrones there, and it's like Beatlemania. From that, now that's a very big section of the library, because that's a big, big, successful thing, but it's still.
1:04:47 Speaker 00 So they say.
1:04:48 Speaker 01 It's like people are hanging out in their sections of the library, whereas we all used to be in the same library and see what was special to everybody. And, you know, I, I have a romantic memory of that. It's moved on since then. There won't be, you know, you're not going to have a Warren Beatty, right? It doesn't, it's not going to happen.
1:05:11 Speaker 00 That's old man talk, I think.
1:05:13 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, I'm an old man now, so that's okay.
1:05:16 Speaker 00 I think for the youngsters, Chalamet is their Beatty. May Chalamet be your Beatty is an old Irish blessing.
1:05:23 Speaker 01 You know, I think here's the thing is, I saw an interview with him, and he said,
1:05:30 Speaker 01 That the only thing he knew about Bob Dylan was that he was an American icon.
1:05:33 Speaker 00 Right.
1:05:34 Speaker 01 Before he did this thing, which made me think, well, of course, that actually makes some sense. You know, you're a young person, there's all this information coming at you from everywhere. And all I really know about him is he's an American icon. Don't be a chatty man, right? I don't, I don't know, I don't have the relationship to it like a movie star, which you're probably right. It's probably an old man's conversation that also probably has to do with a certain level of reclusiveness that has me living 23 and a half hours a day in this room. So, yeah.
1:06:10 Speaker 00 DiCaprio?
1:06:12 Speaker 01 Oh, well, that's before they stopped the movie star. I think the movie star manufacturer ran out around Jennifer Lawrence time or something.
1:06:20 Speaker 00 She was the last?
1:06:21 Speaker 01 She was probably the last movie star, yeah.
1:06:23 Speaker 00 Woody Allen?
1:06:25 Speaker 01 Woody Allen, yes, and about Woody Allen.
1:06:27 Speaker 00 You made a great movie with him.
1:06:29 Speaker 01 I loved him.
1:06:29 Speaker 00 With Lowdown. Samantha Morton was the female lead.
1:06:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:32 Speaker 00 Friend of the pod, she's very talented.
1:06:37 Speaker 00 Would you work with him again? Do you think he's got a bad rap?
1:06:39 Speaker 01 I'd work with him in a heartbeat.
1:06:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:41 Speaker 01 If it was the right thing, if it was the right thing. Do I think he has a bad rap? Look, with these things, I don't, I don't know anyone well enough to say 100% this didn't happen, that didn't happen, or something, you know? And God forbid, you're wrong and there's a victim involved in something, right?
1:07:09 Speaker 01 But, boy, I find the stuff that I know about, and I haven't, you know, read everything, the stories are mostly told by people that I wouldn't trust with a dime. It just seems so heavily weighted in that way and, and...
1:07:36 Speaker 00 You're talking generally, right? Or not specifically about Woody Allen?
1:07:40 Speaker 01 About with the Woody Allen situation.
1:07:42 Speaker 00 Because it was mainly his estranged, uh, daughter?
1:07:48 Speaker 01 Well, yes, daughter, but also son.
1:07:54 Speaker 00 Ronan Farrow, the journalist.
1:07:56 Speaker 01 Well, you gave him that title, not me.
1:08:01 Speaker 01 But yes, Ronan Farrow.
1:08:03 Speaker 00 Well, was that a little rare?
1:08:05 Speaker 01 I'm just clarification.
1:08:07 Speaker 00 I think he's quite respected. Writes for The New Yorker.
1:08:11 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:08:15 Speaker 01 And I, I, I understand that. Yeah. But look, okay, let's put it this way. I am not aware, and maybe I'm just an ignoramus. I'm fair, that's a possibility. I am not aware of any clinical psychologist or psychiatrist
1:08:39 Speaker 01 or anyone I've ever heard talk or spoken to around the subject of pedophilia
1:08:50 Speaker 01 that in a, in an eighty years of life, there's accusations of it happening only once.
1:09:00 Speaker 01 I'm not aware of that. And when people try to associate what were his, let's say, much younger girlfriends,
1:09:10 Speaker 01 you know, right or wrong is not the conversation here, but
1:09:16 Speaker 01 post puberty consensual stuff is, to me, a different conversation. And it has its, you know.
1:09:26 Speaker 00 Post puberty, age of consent, we should, yeah.
1:09:29 Speaker 01 All of those things.
1:09:30 Speaker 00 An adult woman.
1:09:31 Speaker 01 You know, yeah. And so I just think that whatever is the worst of people's suspicions about him, you know, just check them with the facts separate from the moment and the movement and all who benefited from that.
1:09:52 Speaker 01 Like, just, let's just take a second. That's all I'm saying. But I don't, I, you know, I, I, I, I see he's not proven guilty. So I take him as innocent and I would work with him in a heartbeat.
1:10:08 Speaker 00 Do you fall out of, I'm trying to kind of get, if there's a unified field theory of Sean Penn and his work, right?
1:10:16 Speaker 00 Acting, directing, writing, but also humanitarianism, fundraising, advocacy, documentary work.
1:10:25 Speaker 00 It's hard to really wrap your arms around the whole of it, you know, in a sense. What I do sense is that one feeds the other and that from time to time you need to stop acting. Either you fall out of love with it or you need to touch grass. How would you put it?
1:10:43 Speaker 01 There was a period of time where I was really miserable acting. Maybe, maybe I could say from after Milk and before Daddio. So that's like 15 years that it was just miserable. And it took me a long time to identify why. Cause I'd like to think it was just this project or that producer or that problem thing or these. But I found myself sometimes working with really good people and still being miserable.
1:11:17 Speaker 01 And so I just thought, maybe I shouldn't do this anymore if I, if I can afford it.
1:11:25 Speaker 01 And then, you know, or I'll do a job, you know, that pays a lot here or there and, and not put too much of my life into that now. And also, you know, getting, well, you sort of feel like you're allowed to, you know, retire or sort of if you want.
1:11:42 Speaker 00 But your thing about, when you, Milk, obviously terrific movie. You won an Oscar for it. But then when you, you talk about falling out of love with it, did you figure out what it was? Was it taking too much out of you? Like, is it that it's emotionally draining or you felt you were on autopilot or something else?
1:11:58 Speaker 01 It just wasn't, I wasn't being, in other words, just because something is smart and populated well by cast and crew.
1:12:10 Speaker 01 Doesn't mean you should do it. I knew this in some way intellectually before, but I really came to understand now that it's got to be something that I am really immediately engaged in. Like is part of my world today, what my questions are. I need it to be like directing has been for me, where of course, the script is exactly what I'm interested in right now. I wrote it right now, so that's why I want to do it. As an actor, you don't have as many opportunities where something comes to you. Like those two movies I just got gifted with, like in both cases, they were very present subjects in my imagination.
1:12:53 Speaker 01 And so if I'm not doing that, what I my dream day, I get up, five o'clock in the morning, maybe, I get my coffee, feed the dogs, and then I start a wood project. And I'll go till one o'clock in the morning and then do it all again.
1:13:13 Speaker 00 Carpentry?
1:13:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:15 Speaker 00 Do you still drink?
1:13:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I love it.
1:13:18 Speaker 00 Do you?
1:13:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:13:20 Speaker 00 On weeknights?
1:13:21 Speaker 01 Does that include Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday?
1:13:25 Speaker 00 Yeah. What's your tipple of choice?
1:13:27 Speaker 01 Vodka tonic, solid drink. If you take me to a wedding and the bride is begging me to have a glass of champagne, I'll say, I'll drink with you, but not that. It's got to, it just makes life simpler. I know what I drink, I know the effect it has, I know what my pace is, and I'm good. On the odd night, I'll do a whiskey, but it's pretty much, but don't tell the bride. Like you say, then they'll say, well, you do the whiskey, you can do the champagne. No, I don't like the peer pressure of, you know, have one of that. Hey, have a shot of tequila. Never.
1:13:58 Speaker 00 Never?
1:13:59 Speaker 01 No. I always say it's a delivery system for ice, because I'm a big ice chewer. You probably see the smoking. In fact, the only reason I'm smoking so much is because this is even worse to be like doing in front of a camera, these toothpick things. But I'm pretty, you know, so I like to chew ice and ice tastes great when it's glazed in vodka tonic.
1:14:19 Speaker 00 The smoking hasn't caught up with you?
1:14:23 Speaker 01 Well, like.
1:14:28 Speaker 01 I was beating the shit out of myself about smoking at a certain point. I just like, oh god, gotta quit. I can't be a slave to this fucking thing anymore. I've gotta, and you know, it's bad for you, it's gonna do this and that. And then I, but I would always have that calculation that finally really landed for me, which is that, notwithstanding heart disease, save that for the next, next time. Cancer is that it takes nitro and glycerin to make cancer. And so that could be any of these carcinogens or whatever is one of the other one that's consistent is stress.
1:15:10 Speaker 01 I was rereading some Bukowski about two years ago. And I found this, this line, it's a pretty famous line of his, but I hadn't thought of it for a long, long time and never related it this way. And it was, find something you love and let it kill you. And, you know, I know that they're not good for you, but I don't have stress about it. And I love it. I love smoking. And I'm not saying it has no effect on somebody else, you know? Your kids are worried about you because you smoke. That's an effect on somebody, you know? But I, if, if booze isn't making me want to go out and punch somebody, which it doesn't
1:15:54 Speaker 01 anymore, or, or, or if I'm not inclined to get behind the wheel of a car or to carry a loaded firearm when I'm drinking, then well, I'm not doing any, you know? I feel fine about it.
1:16:17 Speaker 00 I mean, I could keep going, but how long have we gone for? Quite a while, right? I feel like, um...
1:16:24 Speaker 01 I'm sorry that I go on, I know I go on a lot of tangents.
1:16:27 Speaker 00 No, no, the tangents are a lot of what's fun.
1:16:31 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:16:43 Speaker 00 I'm back. Thank you for listening or watching. That was a lot of fun. What a thrill to go up into the mountain top, well, hilltop redoubt of a Hollywood acting legend. I felt very privileged. And I felt like we could have gone for another couple of hours, crack open some of the ambers, right, kick back, and just what happens, happens, right? What happens at Sean Penn's house stays at Sean Penn's house. That's one of our mottos. The upcoming film, which we talked about, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean, is One Battle After Another. It's due out later this year.
1:17:23 Speaker 00 And just to say, I don't smoke. I've had a few cigarettes in my life. It was quite nice to be around smoking again. I think he normally doesn't smoke that much, but that he likes to have something to fiddle with, and normally he uses toothpicks. This is what he told me at the end of the conversation. But since he couldn't use toothpicks, I think because maybe it was a sound issue, or it was some issue.
1:17:45 Speaker 02 He didn't want to be on camera.
1:17:47 Speaker 00 He didn't want to be on, that's Millie, my producer. Welcome to the chat. He didn't want to be on camera picking his teeth, so he smoked a bit more than usual. Regular listeners will notice I've had, well, I had another pop at Game of Thrones, which came out last week with Bella Ramsey. I'm dialing up the feud. George R.R. Martin, you're on notice. Things no one ever said. We need Tolkien, but with more sex. Right? Who said that? No one, ever. I do like Merlin. You've ever seen Merlin? That's on iPlayer. That's a nice programme. Nice. Is that my new brand? Why can't things be more nice? Merlin, which
1:18:32 Speaker 00 has Bradley James, Colin Morgan and others, it was about 10 years ago. You can watch that with the whole family. There's no wenching in that. There's no wenching, like, come on, on the morrow, we will wench. And they talk, they don't talk fake medieval English either. They just say things like, hi Merlin, are you feeling all right? Yeah, they just say, normal. They didn't speak like in weird medieval English. In medieval times, they spoke Middle English, which was actually a different language. "Quand at Aprila with hisseur resurta." Yes, I do speak a little Middle English. I've got parts of Chaucer memorized. Did you know that? How much do you want me to do? Bit more. "Quand at Aprila with hisseur resurta, the droght of March hath perced to the rota,
1:19:17 Speaker 00 and bothered every vine in switch liqueur." I can go way longer than you might think.
1:19:23 Speaker 00 "Of which vertu in gendered is the flure, one zephyrose eke with a sweeter breath." Can George R R Martin do that?
1:19:34 Speaker 00 If you were playing bingo at home, you can check off Woody Allen, also Trump.
1:19:41 Speaker 00 You can't put in... Well, Mel Gibson, he should probably be on the bingo card. Blacking up wasn't on there. It's a shame we didn't bring up I Am Sam, which was when Shaun played someone with a significant disability. Because that's a bit like blacking up in a way. In the sense that it's actors taking on attributes like that they don't have. And which you could say is acting, but all of this has become very contentious. And I don't know that you'd... I don't know, I think there's questions being asked now about how appropriate it is to play someone with a disability.
1:20:19 Speaker 02 Playing a gay man in milk.
1:20:21 Speaker 00 And as Millie points out, playing a gay man in milk.
1:20:27 Speaker 00 And playing a milkman in gay.
1:20:31 Speaker 00 Not many people saw that. The people were offended that someone with no experience in the lactation business was taking on the role of a milkman.
1:20:43 Speaker 00 Why it was called gay is a strange question. It was the name of the milkman. Marvin Gaye.
1:20:53 Speaker 00 That's good stuff. Okay, I think that's it. Oh, yes, credits. The producer was Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Maisie Williams. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. And the executive producer was Aaron Fellows. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira. This is a Mindhouse production for Spotify.
Previous S5 EP1: Bella Ramsey discusses being a child actor, dealing with critical fandoms and overcoming emetophobia Next S5 EP3: Bryan Johnson discusses life-changing psychedelics, superintelligence, and night-time erections Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated