Sean Penn’s new movie, “One Battle After Another,” is tough to pin down. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor, it’s a thriller about political terrorists on the run in an America that looks much like our own, albeit further down the road toward authoritarian white nationalism. But the film is much more than that. It’s spiked with moments of weird humor, righteous anger and heart. That potent admixture means it’s likely to cause some very strong reactions.
Which makes it a perfect fit for Sean Penn. The actor is also, in his own way, a kind of instigator, always willing to stir up strong feelings and make things happen. He does that in his acting, of course: He won Academy Awards for his work in “Mystic River” and “Milk.” He does it in his occasional, somewhat gonzo journalism, and he does it as an outspoken advocate for his liberal political views.
Penn’s swaggering approach to life has caused more than a few eye-rolls in his direction, but it is hard to seriously doubt the depth of his commitment to world affairs. The best proof of that is his long-running humanitarian aid group, Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE), which lends on-the-ground help in places like Haiti, Sudan and even here in the United States.
I spoke with Penn for the first time a few weeks ago at his home in Malibu, Calif. We talked in a room surrounded by personal memorabilia, ranging from photos of his family and famous friends to an impressively daunting collection of knives. His big dog ambled in and out, plumbers were noisily working on the lush property and the smoke from his many cigarettes hung in the air. The 65-year-old was exactly what I’d been hoping for: sincere, funny, anguished, a little crotchety, self-aware about his own grandiosity and, as always, unafraid to let it fly.
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You’re a politically involved person. You help run a humanitarian aid organization. You’re fully aware of the challenges we’re all facing right now. Given that, do you ever wrestle with the utility of making art? This is going to go a little sideways, but maybe in a good way. I’d always kind of felt intuitively that it’s all the same thing. Your work as an actor is exactly the same job as your work as a craftsman or a welder or a CORE representative. It’s just, which hammer are you picking up on that day to 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 less alone for a moment, that’s no different than to rebuild housing for someone. It’s all kind of one thing.
“One Battle After Another” has a lot of tonal variation, but I found parts of it quite chilling, particularly the depiction of an America run by fascistic white nationalists. Watching it, you’re not quite sure how much of an alternate reality the movie is supposed to be showing. What’s your answer to that? How close are we to the America of the film? It’s a good question for everyone to ask. What is America? We know it never fulfilled its promise to everybody. It takes time to grow, and I’m OK with that. I’m sorry if I’m in a lucky crew because of the color of my skin or gender, but sitting back, it looks like things are gonna take time. My father was blacklisted by the country he fought and risked his life for [during the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and ’50s]. They told him he couldn’t work again, and he couldn’t get any bitterness going toward it. He just said, “Hey, speed bumps in the making of a country.” I aspire to think that way. We’re in a period of incredible unpredictability and ugliness, stupidity, over-dependence on technology, misuse of it, disconnection. Maybe the way to deal with that is to say, That’s OK, what do I do tomorrow? This fight for freedom, 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, Col. Steven Lockjaw, is this stew of perversions and insecurities. Tell me about how you thought about him. There’s a great conversation with the former president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica. He was turning on its head this old idea that 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. Now, how does that apply to Lockjaw? What I was reading [in the script] was someone who worships at the church of lethality, and understands lethality.
In a round table you did for The Times with some of your colleagues from “One Battle After Another,” you said prior to working with Paul Thomas Anderson, you’d been disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years. Prior to working with Christy Hall and Dakota Johnson [on 2023’s “Daddio”]. I got two gifts in one year that broke a 15-year depression about the movies.
What was that depression about? For a long time I gauged the value that a film would have on a good script, a good cast, 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, and you get more aware of the sacrifices. It’s about time, which we don’t get more of. 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 with people you love, and it wasn’t since Gus Van Sant’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, my dog, and I said, What the [expletive] am I doing here? I felt like, maybe I’m done with all this.
Do you think the work suffered during that period? No question about it. You are given automatic cover once you represent a certain kind of quality stamp. You get away with too much. Marlon [Brando] said one time, “I really have to suit up for that one.” I remember I was doing a play in San Francisco, and backstage at the theater, Marlon’s call comes through out of the blue. He hadn’t been in touch for a few months. He says, “You know, the idea of opening in a play, to me, would be like summoning up the Inquisition.” I got to the point where I was feeling like suiting up was summoning up the Inquisition. To get re-enthused and feel your imagination opening up again, to connect with the childlike thing that comes with inventing a character — when you’ve lost touch with that and then you rediscover it, it’s even better.
When you were coming up in the ’80s, you became friends with people like Jack Nicholson, Brando, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Hopper. These figures who had an aura of rebelliousness and also 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? From a young age, and still today, it’s very specific: 77. 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, 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 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.
Nothing wrong with green juice. 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. Also, the people you mentioned were the kind of people that excited me about the job. These were just interesting guys who I liked a lot, who were incredibly generous toward me as friends, and also supporters of the kinds of stories I wanted to tell and how I wanted to work.
There’s a quote I saw that your mom, the actress Eileen Ryan, gave to Woody Allen. You were working with Woody on “Sweet and Lowdown,” and he said something to the effect of he didn’t quite get you. And your mom said to Woody, “The thing you need to understand about Sean is that he’s just embarrassed at having had a happy childhood.” [Laughs.] It’s true, I had a very happy childhood. Psychiatrists have been pushing, pushing, trying to find that capital-T trauma in my childhood. It’s not there. I made every demon door in my life as a young adult and forward. I did it myself. My parents were great — loving family, great brothers, and it was 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 and maybe I still sometimes do? But it had nothing to do with my childhood.
I wondered if something in you thought that guys like Hopper or Bukowski represented what an artist was supposed to be, and you thought the atmosphere of your youth was not conducive to that. My childhood had one drawback: A lot of it was spent waiting for it to be over. And the reason for that is this barbaric enforcement of mandatory schooling, which stole a lot of my childhood. I never spent a productive minute in school. 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. I hated it. Tell the shrinks, it was school. It [expletive] me up.
In the book “Sean Penn: His Life and Times,” by Richard T. Kelly, which was published about 20 years ago, there are references in there from people who worked with you who — You’ve done so much homework.
I try. But in the biography a lot of people close to you refer to you as having real anger inside. Where does that anger come from? Look around. I love humanity. My problem is humans. You go to the market, 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. You know that’s not how life’s supposed to be. There’s supposed to be an experience of professionalism. You get on an airplane and a steward —
What are you talking about? Incompetence drives me out of my [expletive] mind! It triggers me on a level you can’t imagine. I start to equate my soul with a volcano.
Your dog just came in. She knows me. She has to console me.
In that biography I mentioned is also an anecdote describing a misadventure in Macau in 1986, when, as one does sometimes, you dangled a pushy paparazzo over a balcony, then were jailed briefly, but broke out of jail and escaped from the country by jetfoil. More, please. Was there a jetfoil waiting for you? Did you know how to drive a jetfoil? It’s like the ferry. They go back and forth all day.
So it wasn’t that exciting? We were passengers on the jetfoil. We got on like normal passengers and then had to go to a house on the Kowloon side and wait until something got settled. But the guy, first of all, we didn’t put him past his waistline over that balcony. There was never an intent to drop him off of it. My friend at the time, who was my kickboxing trainer, needed a job, so I got him a job as security. He overreacted. This guy was holding something when he jumped out at us, and my friend responded instinctively; I responded instinctively. About halfway to the balcony, I saw it was a camera and not a weapon. So I was marching him through the room, also through what was an open balcony, and yeah, we got him down across it and I’m yelling at my friend, “It’s a camera,” and we didn’t have time to pull him back before the hotel security turned on us and grabbed us. We never got to show we weren’t gonna kill him, and that’s when “Midnight Express” happens and we just blew out of there and ran to the jetfoil, and that’s the whole story.
I was hoping there was more of a James Bond element to the jetfoil, but mystery solved. There’s an old quote by you where you said that “hypocrisy is the primary experience of American life.” I’m curious how your own hypocrisy has shown up. Well, daily. 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 hypocrisy has found its way recently in a very potent way into being what we might associate with charisma. We’re dangerously adept at giving celebration to great weaknesses. But yes, I’m not speaking as someone separate from the problem. I guess I try to stay within contradiction. I am certainly willfully contradictory.
Is there a contradiction you could tease out? Sure. Ukraine deserves our full support in killing people. That’s contradictory to almost anything else I would say or believe in. I don’t think there’s another solution. But that’s contradictory.
Penn and I spoke again four days later.
We’re talking a couple of days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated — another demoralizing event in what feels like the ongoing degradation of civic life in America. I know that people’s mileage may vary with your political opinions, but I know that you take being an American citizen seriously. So I want to know how you understand this moment. First of all, just as a human on Earth, it’s fair to say I’m processing what happened. I’ve increasingly lost any kind of understanding about why we have as a country become so compliant with the public-facing polarization, when any of us who talk to each other understand that while there’s this incredible partisanship that is expressed in the power-hustling of politics and media, it isn’t the case with individuals. I’m getting to Charlie Kirk. These fashions of violence; this one seems different. It seems different than the members of Congress. It seems different than the insurance executive. It seems even different than the attempt on the president. There’s something about this one. Charlie Kirk, it seemed to me, though I didn’t follow him a lot — one of these people who certainly I disagree with on 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’ve gotta fight it out and find a compromise. These things do come into fashion, and the way we kill the fashion of it is people of conscience on both sides recognizing that if somebody really believes something, that’s your friend.
Well, it depends what they believe, right? I’m not talking about some sociopathic Nazism. I’m talking about if somebody believes that a human being starts at conception, if you can’t understand that concept, you’re just stupid. And if you’re not willing to tolerate the concept as a concept that’s held 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? 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 made a documentary about Zelensky and Ukraine, “Superpower,” which came out 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 toward Ukraine in 2025? I think he has developed a very sophisticated understanding of it.
What is that understanding? 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.
In “Superpower,” there’s a brief mention of when you and Jack Nicholson were at a film festival in Moscow for “The Pledge” and you had some sit-down with Vladimir Putin. In the film, you glancingly refer to that meeting as a “deviant memory.” But can you tell me more about your impressions of Putin? I was by no means a student of the fellow at that time. By now, I find him transparent and almost uninteresting. I think his inability to face a new world makes him static. The expressions he gives, the inflection of voice, what’s in his eyes when he smiles, the sarcasm, the sincerity when he’s serious and telling his people this or that. I’ve seen the tape too many times, and I’m just bored and disgusted with a murderer.
How have your own politics changed over time? I idealize humanity less, in that I understand that we’re going to keep killing each other for the foreseeable future. But if you’re at the same place politically when you’re older as you were when you were younger, you’re adding a problem to the world. It’s interesting. I brought my family on a safari many years ago. We went out to visit a Maasai tribe. They’d never seen white people before. I said to our guide, “It’s so enriching to see a culture so preserved.” And he said, “Don’t do that.” He said, “Anything that remains static dies.” And I think in this country, if this can be a turning point, this Charlie Kirk thing, 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? That’s where we can put our hope and encouragement and our imagination, which is the only thing that’s going to get us anywhere.
Just to turn to the subject of artists and politics, there was a pledge that more than 2,000 people in the film industry signed, tantamount to a boycott of the Israeli movie industry. People like Javier Bardem, Emma Stone, Adam McKay, Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Brian Cox and Mark Ruffalo signed it. Do you see value in cultural boycotts generally? And what’s your view of this one? I wasn’t aware of it. I was kind of off-grid for a few weeks. Typically, I have an allergy to movements or group things. If I’m gonna boycott something, I want to do it myself. But I think there’s a time and place, and I would consider things. This one, it’s 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 [Israeli] administration is an enemy of every state and humanity. So I may well support that. I just don’t know how it affects things, and I want to know better before I consider it.
Has CORE looked at trying to help in Gaza? We work in conflict zones. We’ve been in Ukraine since Day 1. We’re working in Sudan, and so we have people who know the risks. But part of my job is rational consideration of risk-benefit, and my feeling right from go was I don’t trust any of our governmental organizational contacts on either side and I’m not ready to ask our people to go there.
Lots of people get involved in politics, but not a lot of people, whether it’s because of humility or timidity, have the thing that you seem to have: the desire or willingness to be a man in the arena. Who or what compelled that? Muhammad Ali, Bob Geldof, Bono, George.
George Harrison? Clooney.
You can’t just say “George.” That’s a common name! Well, it’s because he’s in the current conversation so much. You know, Bono — you talk about somebody who stands with empathy. He’s an extraordinary human being.
The name you didn’t mention in that list was your father. My own hunch is that some part of your desire to try to participate in the world and do good comes from wanting to live up to the ideal of your father, who stood up to the blacklist and was a heroic fighter pilot in the Second World War. Not a pilot. He was a tail gunner and a bombardier. I’m sure you’re right. He’s been my hero in everything. Most significantly, he’s a guy who remained gentle and never bitter. If I was told I can’t work in the country I fought for and risked my life for, I think I’d be friggin’ seething. Not him. In fact, whenever I was seething, he’d listen and say, “Everybody has their own truth, kid.”
We talked about how in the recent past you struggled with motivation about acting, and also how you can feel a lot of anger at the world. So what gets you up in the morning these days? I’m not averse to feeling extremely frustrated with the world. “The world”: We know what we’re saying, I think; I don’t want to be grandiose, or I don’t know how not to be. But 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 rage to get me to a clarity of knowing how evil and obscene it is. The frustration is with those who are not willing to be sober enough to recognize our sacred duty to support the defense of Ukraine. But I don’t even call that anger so much. [Penn points to one eye] I wake up every day with this eye clear about the threat to the environment, the anguish people are going through, attempts to figure out how I can be of any value-added. [Penn points to his other eye] And this one is driving me from the time I wake up, and all I see is that this is still a magic trick of a beautiful cosmos and I am gonna [expletive] enjoy it every day — and I do. Sorry to those who would have me do otherwise, but I am feeling great.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
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