In March, Sean Penn won his third Oscar, this one for Best Supporting Actor for One Battle After Another. Penn did not attend the Oscars, nor did he send anyone in his place to collect the Oscar. That wasn’t surprising. What surprised me was that Penn actually Oscar-campaigned a little bit. Not much, and it was mostly just promotion for the film, but he actually appeared to be playing the Hollywood game for a couple of months. He attended some premieres, he did a Variety Actors-on-Actors video with Julia Roberts, his ham-like visage was on the cover of W Magazine, etc. He stopped playing the game after attending the Golden Globes. In a conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival, Penn explains why he stopped campaigning or showing up to award shows after the Globes.
Sean Penn hates selfies and will not, under any circumstances, go to a public gathering with more than eight people — which is why he was noticeably absent from the recent 98th Academy Awards, where he won Best Supporting Actor (his third Oscar).
The revelations came during a conversation between Penn and CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins during a Friday afternoon talk at Spring Studios in lower Manhattan as part of the 25th annual Tribeca Festival, running June 3-14. Penn is a regular fixture at the fest, owing in large part to his long-time personal and professional relationship with one of the fest’s co-founders, Robert De Niro, and was his usual frank and uncensored self during the talk, bouncing from topics like Ukraine (“they will prevail”) to his newfound passion for woodworking to why he’s mellowed out a lot since his hell-raising younger days.
After complimenting his moderator, telling Collins she’s “brought so much of what real integrity is to covering this president” while noting that “if anybody ever had any question of who’d win the stare-down contest, I think this week was a killer,” Penn launched into an explanation as to why he wasn’t present at the Oscars.
“It’s not just [that it’s] an awards show,” he said. “It would be the same if this group was going to an afterparty and one stepped into that. That always represented social discomfort for me; too many people. I’m now down, committed for life, that I won’t go anywhere to be in a designated group beyond eight people.”
The problem is that there large public gatherings only “gives you 15 minutes per person,” which to him triggers his “anxiety” and is “dread-provoking.”
“The two times I had gone I felt relief that I’d won because so many people out there had worked really hard for that,” he offered, adding, “There’s the politics of that stuff.”
According to Penn, he’d spoken with his “One Battle After Another” colleagues before the Oscars and they were all on the same page that it was “better for my mental health” if he [did] not attend. So, he went to Ukraine instead, where he’s been working tirelessly to shine a light on its being under siege by Russia, and how it’s in need of Western support. Penn still watched the Oscars in Ukraine, where it started at 2 a.m. and went until 5 a.m., and said he was grateful to not be there.
“I really got to enjoy the Academy Awards for the first time,” he admitted. “It was great.”
Penn made the decision to no longer attend awards shows after venturing to this year’s Golden Globes. “The best that I could ever muster was relief,” he shared. “Knowing that I wasn’t going to do that anymore, I did one before that this year. I went to the Golden Globes; I’d never been to that before. And that’s where I decided, ‘I can’t do this.’ [It’s] the ninth person. And it’s not the low-hanging fruit of ‘I don’t wanna be around all this fake Hollywood’ or something.”
While he was leaving the Golden Globes, Penn was bombarded by people wanting selfies, which again, made him never, ever want to attend a public event with more than eight people.
“People should not do selfies ever with anyone. It’s bad for you; it’s bad for everyone. It’s a soul-sucker,” he said. “It’s the Holocaust grandmother and her 6-year-old paraplegic wheeling over? It’s a hard no.”
I’ve seen and heard other actors from Penn’s generation and older complain about the selfie thing too, because they came up in an era of autograph-seekers. No one wants autographs anymore, they want (multiple) selfies, and Penn’s generation is over it. As for not attending the Oscars… I think many of us hoped that the Oscar would go to Delroy Lindo or Stellan Skarsgaard (two veterans who have never won), but once Penn’s name was called, I was glad he didn’t go to the Oscars. He would have really brought the mood down. Michael B. Jordan, Jessie Buckley and Amy Madigan got to pose for all of their photos without having to placate Penn’s sourness. Plus, I assume everyone was grateful that they didn’t have to smell Penn’s cigarette-smoking in the auditorium.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, screencaps courtesy of CBS/Golden Globes telecast.
