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Sean Penn has reiterated his defence of Woody Allen, saying he would “work with him in a heartbeat”.
Penn was speaking on The Louis Theroux Podcast, and told Theroux that while he felt he didn’t know Allen well enough to know for certain that “100% this didn’t happen”, he said: “The stories are mostly told by people that I wouldn’t trust with a dime. It just seems so heavily weighted in that way.”
Allen is accused of sexual abuse by the director’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow; Allen has always denied the allegations and two official investigations by social services departments in Connecticut and New York state were closed after finding no evidence against him. Allen’s son, investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, has been outspoken in support of Dylan, while adopted son Moses Farrow has been equally outspoken in defence of Allen. Penn worked with Allen on the 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.
Penn said: “I am not aware of any clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or anyone I’ve ever heard talk or spoken to around the subject of paedophilia that, in 80 years of life, there’s accusations of it happening only once. I’m not aware of that. And when people try to associate what were his, let’s say, much younger girlfriends, right or wrong … is to me a different conversation.”
He added: “I see he’s not proven guilty, so I take him as innocent, and I would work with him in a heartbeat.”
In the same interview Penn cast new light on his meeting with former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2018 at the height of the Syrian civil war. Penn was working on a now-abandoned documentary about the Arab Spring uprisings. Penn told Theroux he wanted permission to speak to Isis prisoners and speak to Syrians “on the street … without a minder”. According to Penn, al-Assad’s response was, “Absolutely, we have nothing to hide”, and then invited him to lunch.
Penn said: “I got into his car and … we drove about 20 minutes through Damascus. To this day, I have to believe it was The Truman Show. That every block all the way to his house was staged. People driving up next to him and saying, “hello, Mr President”. “Hey, how are you?” This kind of thing. Virtually no visible security.”
“We went to the house. Again, no sign of security of any kind. He’s there with his wife and his children. His children are as western as any California kid, and they’re listening to Kanye and dancing around.”
However, Penn said as negotiations progressed, access was denied and he decided to drop the film.
Penn also had harsh comments on both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Trump, he said, might be “extremely smart for his time and what it valued”, adding: “But what he values is so base. I won’t equate that with intelligence. It’s truly void of soul. And really, it actively engages in cruelty.”
Penn said that Musk, who until recently was heading a so-called “department of government efficiency” for Trump’s administration resulting in the shutdown of swathes of public services, appeared only to “value destruction of things and people”, adding. “I can’t associate that with any intelligence that’s going to do humankind any good.”
Saying he had met Musk “on several occasions”, Penn suggested that Musk’s insecurities were down to being a “prematurely balding teenager, white in apartheid South Africa, who has no social skills” and that in his view Musk was a combination of “a lot of destructive energy and a lot of stuff that may end up being very productive for other generations”.
Penn also reflected on his tempestuous relationship with Madonna, to whom he was married between 1985 and 1989, and in the course of which he had a number of run-ins with paparazzi. Responding to Theroux’s question about Madonna’s statement in her 1991 documentary In Bed with Madonna that Penn was “the love of her life”, Penn said: “She’s very sweet. Look, she’s been a good friend for a lot of years. It didn’t take us long to realise that we had mistaken a good first date for a wedding partner. It didn’t take us long to recover after we got divorced, maybe a year, in a friendship. I have a lot of fond memories of it – it’s not all jail. But there was a lot of alcohol and she’d be fairly accusing me of that.”
Penn also said that he may have helped accelerate the rise of celebrity culture by his occasionally violent responses to harassment by the media. “[It] added to the idea you can go provoke people like this idiot. I’m probably partially responsible for this explosion that led to all this. Extreme creepy fascination with famous people and things like that. My life was much simpler before [meeting Madonna]. But she became a lightning rod of attention. I was there.”
