Acting’s answer to Bono is now a bona-fide journalist, tracking down the world’s most wanted man, interviewing him in person and getting his story published in Rolling Stone, no less. Sean Penn, whose story on Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman appeared online on January 9, has gone from a 10-year-old surfing in Malibu (as he recounts in his piece, comparing himself to El Chapo, who at the same age was working on poppy fields) to an acclaimed actor to a globe-trotting activist with a penchant for visiting nations not always friendly to his US homeland.
Explaining his stance in a post-Katrina 2008 piece for Huffington Post (for which he has written on several occasions), he wrote: “I have been in the public eye to varying degrees, for most of my 48 years, and had many occasions to sit in the front row of popular and political culture. I can speak in firsthand, to bearing witness to an often untruthful, reckless and demonizing media.”
His involvement in world affairs has included drawing the ire of the British over discussing the Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas with the Argentinian president; and freeing American entrepreneur Jacob Ostreicher from a Bolivian prison in 2013 (“I spent two weeks rolled up in a fetal position in Sean’s house… and through it all, Sean sat with me for hours, sometimes sitting with me all night, rubbing my back, saying quietly, ‘Stay strong Jacob, give yourself some time,’” Ostreicher said after his release).
Here’s a look at five of Penn’s self-assigned diplomatic and humanitarian missions, and high-profile interviews.
Hugo Chavez
The firebrand Venezuelan president enjoyed the close friendship and support of Penn since they met in 2007. Penn has admitted being “involved in the process” of freeing two American hikers in Iran in 2011 — reportedly by asking Chavez to liase with the Iranian president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his behalf. Penn eulogised Chavez, who died in 2013, thusly: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion,” he said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.”
Raul Castro
Penn had already met Castro’s brother, and predecessor as the president of Cuba, Fidel, in 2005 (“On a 2005 family Christmas trip to Cuba, travelling under the auspices of religious tourism, my wife, our children and I were received in a private midnight meeting with then-President Fidel Castro and the great Colombian novelist and nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” he wrote in a Huffington Post piece. In 2008, just before Barack Obama was elected US president (and eight years before he reopened diplomatic relations with Cuba), Penn and Castro had a “seven-hour conversation in Havana that stretched until the wee hours”. In the interview, published in The Nation, Castro suggested he and Obama meet at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base “and begin to solve our problems”.
Mehdi Rafsanjani
In 2005, Penn sat down with the campaign director and son of former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, shortly after attending Friday prayers in Tehran. He quizzed him on hot topics including nuclear energy, freedom of the press and US-Iran relations. “Meanwhile, on the street, there are interesting rumblings about people who dared to challenge the official version of the truth,” he wrote in his lengthy piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Hurricane Katrina
Like other celebrities, Penn was on the scene to help with the deadly chaos wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the US government’s feeble response to the disaster. He took to a boat to help pull people out of the floodwater, but was flooded with criticism that he was exploiting the tragedy for his own publicity (he denied accusations that he had brought along his own photographer). “We got a lot of people out of the water,” Penn said on a CNN appearance. “The rest is for people to talk about.”
Haiti
Haitian president Michel Joseph Martelly named the actor “ambassador-at-large” for the earthquake-stricken Caribbean nation in 2012. It followed Penn’s intensive efforts to help the nation recover from the devastating quake of 2010. His J/P Haitian Relief Organization has built a vast tent camp to house those displaced by the disaster. On Saturday, as news broke of his El Chapo interview, Penn hosted the Sean Penn & Friends: Help Haiti Home charity gala in Los Angeles, where he raised more than $7 million (Dh25.7 million).
