Sean Penn recently promised to “smelt” his Academy Awards if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t make a virtual appearance at the recent ceremony, and there’s been no update there (an appearance didn’t happen). However, the Gaslit star did meet with Zelensky while filming a documentary, and Penn was on the ground when Russia attacked. The actor ended up fleeing to Poland on foot, and now, he’s visiting with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
The interview began awkwardly (as you can see in the above clip, straight off the bat) with Hannity detailing how he’d contacted Penn after hearing about the in-process documentary when war broke out. And then Hannity asked Penn to tell the audience how that conversation started.
Hannity: “Do you remember what you first said to me?”
Penn: “I said that I don’t trust you.”
At that point, Penn elaborated about how he didn’t see the lack of trust as a hurdle. “You know, there are so many people that don’t trust their spouse,” Penn declared. “And yet we have got to get on with life… we have got a situation. I’ve never felt this way about where our country is and what I experienced emotionally in Ukraine, where it had not… we all talk about how divisive things are, how divided things are here.”
The conversation continued quite amicably from there with the two agreeing to disagree on the Biden administration and Penn detailing how he hoped to capture, in his documentary, the unity and the resilience of the Ukrainian people. He also mentioned how he’d originally been captivated by Zelensky’s rise — after portraying an ordinary citizen who accidentally became president in Servant Of The People — and that’s part of why the documentary process began.
Further to the trust point, Penn also discuss how he, as an American, has plenty of “time to indulge my lack of trust, which it becomes a petty thing,” and Ukrainians don’t have that luxury “as people and babies are being vaporized, and that these people are fighting for the very dreams that are the aspiration of all of us Americans.” The entire conversation’s worth watching, and it’s certainly a civilized segment that one rarely sees from opponents on cable news.