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Sean Penn: The actor who is determined to follow his own script

 
Sean Penn’s Rolling Stone interview with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was published the day after the drug lord was recaptured.
Sean Penn’s Rolling Stone interview with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was published the day after the drug lord was recaptured.
Published Jan. 12, 2016

He has jumped into riots, protested wars, drunk with dictators and aided natural disaster relief. Now, Sean Penn has taken his boldest step yet in what appears to be a never-ending quest to ensure he is remembered as more than an actor. He found the world's most hunted criminal and asked him some questions for Rolling Stone magazine.

Why, you might have asked, would Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán sit down with the guy from Fast Times at Ridgemont High?

Because while you know Penn as a box office regular, the cartel kingpin knows him as a rebellious activist. Penn has been using his Hollywood power to jump into high-profile conversations for nearly the entirely of his career, from humanitarian moments in New Orleans and Haiti to political kerfuffles as controversial as this encounter with Guzmán.

"I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting criminals," Penn wrote in his Rolling Stone piece. But as he was gearing up to meet the people who would eventually lead him to Guzmán, Penn said, he was in his "rhythm" — this was the kind of story he has been working toward for years, and not just because it might eventually lead to a movie. The escaped fugitive was "interested in seeing the story of his life told on film," if the project involved Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. Presumably, Guzmán did not foresee that contacting two famous actors would lead authorities to his capture last week.

Penn's drive to be at the heart of the action seems to come from basic curiosity. A 2006 profile in the New Yorker describes how Penn drove into the thick of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992 because he wanted to see it for himself. The adventure ended with a shopping cart crashing into his windshield. "He's not taking a secondhand opinion. He really wants to know what's going down," actor Dennis Hopper told the magazine.

Penn's curiosity took him to more dangerous places. In 2002, he traveled to Iraq. In 2003, after the invasion of U.S. troops, he went back, this time to write about the experience for the San Francisco Chronicle. Penn enjoyed the experience of playing reporter enough to try it again in 2005, this time in Iran. Reporting, he told the New Yorker, was just like acting.

"You wake up in the morning with an interest in listening and expressing," he said. "It all feels the same to me. Acting is Everyman-ness, and loving Everyman. Finally, you're reaching out to people's pain."

Penn wasn't approaching turmoil in the Middle East as an unbiased journalistic observer. He had previously taken out an advertisement in the Washington Post condemning President George W. Bush on Iraq. "The needless blood on your hands, and therefore, on our own, is drowning the freedom, the security, and the dream that America might have been, once healed of and awakened by, the tragedy of September 11, 2001," Penn wrote to Bush in 2010.

Though he allegedly tried to interview Bush, Penn never made it to the White House. Instead, he veered toward a different brand of world leader, developing relationships with Cuban President Raúl Castro and Venezuela's late Hugo Chávez.

Penn visited Cuba for Christmas in 2005 with his then-wife, Robin Wright, and their two children. The family was introduced to Castro in a private midnight meeting, where they discussed the actor's trips to the Middle East, Latin American history and gay rights. Penn wrote about the encounter in a 17,000-word story for The Nation, in which he also describes meeting and befriending Chávez. When Chávez died in 2013, Penn called him one of the "most important forces we've had on this planet."

This is apparently what piqued Guzmán's interest in Penn.

"He asks about my relationship with the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez with what seems to be a probing of my willingness to be vilified through associations," Penn wrote in Rolling Stone. "I speak to our friendship in a way that seems to pass an intuitive litmus test measuring the independence of my perspective."

When he flew to the post-disaster scene of the Haiti earthquake, Penn was accused of showboating. He responded by saying he hoped those critics would "die screaming of rectal cancer," and then founded "J/P Haitian Relief Organization."

"I'm just another asshole trying to feel good about himself," he told Esquire. "And why shouldn't I? That's what everybody should try to do."

But Penn is likely to draw scorn once again, especially because the bulk of his story is dedicated to his adventure securing the interview with Guzmán, rather than questioning of the kingpin himself.

Penn states on several occasions that he is aware of the death and destruction caused by Guzmán's cartel. "I'd seen plenty of video and graphic photography of those beheaded, exploded, dismembered or bullet-riddled innocents, activists, courageous journalists and cartel enemies alike," he wrote. "I was highly aware of committed DEA and other law-enforcement officers and soldiers, both Mexican and American, who had lost their lives executing the policies of the War on Drugs. The families decimated, and institutions corrupted."

It's just the kind of thing that would make a captivating movie, perhaps one day, starring Sean Penn.

— Washington Post