Sean Penn smokes his way through Ambien-fueled interview
A sleepy Sean Penn mumbled his way through an interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” thanks to an airplane and some Ambien.
“I’m doing well,” Penn, 57, told his host on Monday’s episode. “You’ve inherited a little of the Ambien I had to take to get to sleep after a red-eye last night.”
When Colbert, 53, asked if Penn was still under the influence of the doze-inducing drug, Penn shrugged, “A little bit.”
The Oscar winner proceeded to chain-smoke on the air while plugging his debut novel, “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.” He began by explaining that the increased divisiveness in the country, as well as his own hot temper on movie sets, drove him to prefer writing to acting in recent years.
“It’s all about where you engage in an expression creatively, one way or another, and the greatest thing that an actor can bring to the party is to play well with others, it’s the collaboration,” he said. “I increasingly don’t play well with others. So it becomes less enjoyable. I love that process when I love it, but I’m not loving it anymore and that’s why I finally came around to writing a novel because I didn’t have collaborators.”
He added with a hint of a grin, “I was never disappointed with me.”
Part of Penn’s disillusionment with the movie business comes from the sheer volume of films being produced.
“The girl I fell in love with was going into a movie theater in the dark with strangers and seeing something that might last forever,” he said. “Now there is so much content, I can’t keep track of it and nothing seems special.”
Eventually, Colbert gave Penn a brief lecture on the dangers of his seemingly constant tobacco use.
“Please don’t smoke anymore,” he urged. “I don’t mind. My parents smoked when I was a child, so it gives me happy memories to smell cigarette smoke, but you know we want you to be around for a long time and those things are bad for you.”
Penn’s response? “Job security for oncologists.”
Penn’s been busy making press rounds for his tome. He also sat down with Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, where he spoke about his family life with ex-wife Robin Wright, with whom he admitted there is “not a lot of conversation” since their 2010 divorce.
“We don’t not get along,” he explained. “We have very separate relationships with our kids at this point and it seems to work better that way because they are making their own decisions. As it turned out, she and I did not share the same ethical views on parenting, including the continuing parenting of adult children.”
Penn wouldn’t expound on what those ethical differences are, but he did boast about his children’s careers.
“They’re amazing people,” he said of daughter Dylan, 26, and son Hopper Jack, 24. “They’re both acting and modeling, an industry that I’m not very interested in but they seem to have fun with it … I’m supportive of whatever my kids do that keeps them happy and healthy, period.”
While his relationship with his kids is “great,” Penn admitted that his love life isn’t exactly killing it following his split from Charlize Theron in 2015 (despite recently being spotted on a date with Amber Heard).
“I’m never going to take a position that I’ve closed off to love. I think people falling in love with each other is a great, great thing,” he said, but added, “More and more, I do find that the relationships become pretty transactional and it’s not easy to run into somebody that makes life better the next day for you. But if I did, I’d grab it.”