Lahr Sean Penn Fact.L.Indd

PROFILES CITIZEN PENN The many missions of Sean Penn. BY JOHN LAHR n San Francisco one day last June, at attended prayers at a Tehran mosque, a the middle of the hurricane. He’s not 7:45 A.M., an hour when even the women’s-rights demonstration, meet- taking a secondhand opinion. He really panhandlersI on Geary Street were still ings with dissidents, a photo op with wants to know what’s going down.” In asleep, Sean Penn was standing in front former President (and then Presidential 1992, during the Rodney King riots in of me, in sneakers, gray chinos, and candidate) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsan- Los Angeles, Penn drove into the thick denim work shirt, the quiff of his full jani, and, perhaps inevitably, an award of the pandemonium and got a shop- brown hair catching glints of sun, alert ceremony for his acting, at the Film ping cart thrown through his wind- and ready to go. “I’m not so much an Museum of Iran. On his travels, he told shield for his curiosity. In 2002 and early riser as a non-sleeper,” he said, me, he had been “very aware of the ugly 2003, he travelled to Iraq (once before peering over the top of his sunglasses. American,” particularly in the reporto- the American-led invasion and once af- The day before, Penn had flown back rial ranks. “There’s a consistent insensi- terward), in order to observe life there— from Tehran—where, as a correspon- tivity,” he said. “I watched journalists. and, on the second visit, to write about dent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he They could only ever be seen by their it for the Chronicle. “My trip is to per- had been covering the run-up to the Ira- subject as the person with a deadline. sonally record the human face of the nian elections—in order to attend the It’s ‘breaking news,’ literally. By the Iraqi people so that their blood—along junior-high-school graduation of his time you get the news, you’ve broken it. with that of American soldiers—would fourteen-year-old daughter, Dylan. You don’t get a chance to investigate not be invisible on my own hands,” he This morning, he had dropped his stories. These journalists live half the said at a Baghdad press conference in twelve-year-old son, Hopper, at school. time in the Internet café, filing a story.” 2002. In Penn’s opinion, his shift from Now we headed off to Union Square, Penn described his own form of report- actor to correspondent was “seamless.” for some of Sears Fine Food’s Swedish age as “tournalism.” “It’s not an obliga- “You wake up in the morning with an pancakes. tion of the tourist to observe experience interest in listening and expressing,” he Penn, who is forty-five and a com- so much as to have it,” he said. “For me, said. “It all feels the same to me. Acting pact five feet eight, is at ease in his body. a greater accuracy of perception comes is Everyman-ness, and loving Every- There is nothing hunched or furtive in out of that.” man. Finally, you’re reaching out to his bearing—he emanates what in ear- A veteran of some thirty-five films, people’s pain.” lier times would have been called “back- Penn is renowned, in the acting profes- Because of his activism, Penn is often bone.” “The feeling you get about him sion, for the meticulousness of his re- caricatured as a showboating celebrity is that you can’t call his bluff, because search. “Sean is a guy who doesn’t want liberal. “It’s as if Ernest Hemingway he’s not bluffing,” Woody Allen said to analyze a character too much,” Ale- made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Spicoli about Penn, who starred in his 1999 jandro González Iñárritu, who directed before our very eyes,” the media blog film “Sweet and Lowdown.” At the Penn in “21 Grams” (2003), has said. Gawker said when the second install- same time, Penn has a very specific “He wants to be as the character.” For ment of the Iran piece came out. In gravity: reserve is part of his strength his portrait of the stoned surfer Jeff “Team America: World Police,” Trey and his seduction. He is warm but no Spicoli, in “Fast Times at Ridgemont Parker and Matt Stone’s 2004 mario- hail-fellow, polite but without that High” (1982)—the role that made him nette film parody of Bush’s war on ter- come-hither thing. “You see me from famous, at the age of twenty-two— ror, a bubbleheaded Penn puppet says of ten feet away, everyone thinks I’m gonna Penn lived out of his car at the beach; Iraq, “Before Team America showed up bite or something,” Penn said. On first to play a cop, in “Colors” (1988), he it was a happy place. They had flowing meeting, he gave no semaphore of greet- apprenticed to an L.A.P.D. officer; for meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers ing—no handshake, no smile, no small the role of Emmet Ray, “the world’s made of chocolate where the children talk. His presence was his hello. second-greatest guitar player,” in “Sweet danced and laughed and played with Over breakfast, he handed me an Ira- and Lowdown,” he studied guitar gumdrop smiles.” Penn shot back a “sin- nian candy. He was preparing to write fingering. In his forays into politics and cere fuck you” to the filmmakers, in a an article about his trip. (The piece, journalism, Penn relies on the same letter that was reprinted on the Drudge which was twelve thousand words, ran strategy. “Sean’s an investigative re- Report; he also offered to retrace his in the Chronicle in five installments in porter of his emotional life and our steps with them. “We’ll fly to Amman, August.) He had a tantalizing array of world,” Dennis Hopper, who directed Jordan, and I’ll ride with you . twelve incidents from which to draw: he had Penn in “Colors,” told me. “Sean goes to hours through the Sunni Triangle into PHILIP BURKE 48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 3, 2006 TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 48—133SC. Penn’s angry bravado is the key to his appeal. Woody Allen says, “Women want to take care of him and men find him heroic.” TNY—2006_04_03—PAGE 49—133SC.—LIVE ART R14990_RD—PLS PULL KODAK FOR COLOR APPROVAL. Fallujah and Baghdad and I’ll show you a movie about,” he said. On the other Life”: “In the time of your life live,” it around,” he wrote. “When we return, hand, he added, “if there’s anything re- begins, “so that in that good time there make all the fun you want.” ally valuable for me in the craft of act- shall be no ugliness or death for yourself Early in 2005, Penn completed ing, it’s maintaining the skills to hold on or for any life your life touches.” Penn filming for Steven Zaillian’s remake of to the passion I started with.” Acting, he has the confidence of a man who be- “All the King’s Men,” which will open explained, was like parachuting. “If you lieves that the world will provide what later this year, and in which he plays jump out of an airplane, you love the he needs when he needs it. “It’s trusting the mesmerizing and corrupt Louisiana first thousand feet. Now you’re ready to your instincts and your experience,” he kingpin Willie Stark, Robert Penn War- land, but you’re not gonna slow down says. “Call it fate.” ren’s fictional version of Huey Long. just because you aren’t interested any- He is also a fighter. In his gun- His plan now, he told me, was to take a more. The craft is there to make sure toting, paparazzi-punching, midnight- couple of years off from acting. (This that when you jump you’re propelled rambling Hollywood years, which wouldn’t be the first time that he had properly to keep going full speed.” spanned the eighties and early nineties, taken a break from performing. In the he took regular pleasure in publicly bit- nineties, he quit for a few years, and enn is an entrepreneur of his own ing the hands that fed him. “What’s the threw himself into directing instead.) edge—a roiling combination of rage, difference between yogurt and Los An- “I’m out of fuel,” he said, adding, “You buoyancy,P tenderness, and hurt. His geles?” he liked to joke to the press back want to be aware of the impact in terms struggle to contain this combustible emo- then. “Yogurt has a living culture.” But of just how much you put out there. You tional package makes him at once dan- after Penn’s wife, the actress Robin want to maintain the potency of aspects gerous and exciting. In his art and in his Wright Penn, was carjacked in the drive- of yourself—marshal your forces, select life, he takes chances. (“Sean is batty as way of their Santa Monica home, with things you can put your heart and soul a loon and is prone to taking extraordi- their two young children still in the car into. Have time to evolve and re-inform nary risks in foreign towns,” the late (no one was hurt), in 1996, the Penn mé- the creature who’s doing it.” He said Hunter S. Thompson, who knew some- nage decamped for the picturesque tran- that he sometimes has difficulty sustain- thing about recklessness, wrote.) He has quillity of the Bay Area, to a tidy patch of ing his passion over the hard slog of a been known to hand out to friends cards suburban normality about forty-five min- film shoot.

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