Sean Penn Admitted That He Has Been „Miserable on Sets” for 15 Years, Since He Won His Second Oscar
Sean Penn talked about how his perception of acting in films has changed, and whether he would now be able to perform in a role like the one in Milk, for which he won an Oscar.
Sean Penn is a well-recognized and respected actor with several major awards to his credit, including two Oscars for his films in Mystic River and Milk, both for Best Leading Actor. As it turns out, however, although the filmmaker has been continuously starring in various productions, he hasn’t felt happy on movie sets for the past 15 years, as he recently revealed in an interview with The New York Times.
I went 15 years miserable on sets. Milk was the last time I had a good time. I feel like an actor who is playing a leading role and is a known actor and is being paid well has a leadership position on a film and you’ve got to show up with energy and be a bodyguard for the director in some way. I was faking my way through that stuff and that was exhausting. Mostly what I thought was just, “What time is it? When are we going to get off?” I was sure it was done, but I didn’t know how I was going to keep my house running or travel freely or things like that if I stopped.
So it turns out that since he finished Milk, performing no longer gave him the same pleasure as it once did. Nonetheless, he continued acting until finally his friend Dakota Johnson sent him the script for the movie Daddio, in which they eventually starred together and through which he regained his enthusiasm for performing.
I felt like this could be a pleasant experience, and that’s gonna matter to me now, maybe more than in the past.
The actor on the occasion of this interview also mentioned that he wouldn’t currently be able to play in Milk, where he played an openly homosexual politician and activist, which he justified this way: "No. It can't happen in times like this. This is a time of tremendous exaggeration. It's a fearful and thoughtless policy against the human imagination."
