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Nov. 22, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:08
20231122_piers-morgan-uncensored-sean-penn
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hollywood Hero on Front Lines 00:12:00
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, he's a Hollywood hero who swapped the red carpet for the front line of a war.
Two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn for the hour and uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to another uncensored blockbuster, Sean Penn, one-on-one.
He's an actor, a filmmaker, an all-round Hollywood badass.
I'm talking to you.
On a big screen.
My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you.
He's won plaudits and two Oscars.
I did not expect this.
For his powerful performances.
This is my God.
He's won both fans and enemies for his powerful political views.
Sean Penn is an arrogant and self-involved person.
His latest movie is a documentary Superpower, which charts Russia's brutal war on Ukraine.
Penn found himself tracked in Kyiv on the very day Putin's forces invaded, where he came face to face with a president under siege.
Now, with a new war raging in the Middle East, he has a powerful message for the world.
It's emotional, thought-provoking, controversial.
It's all very Sean Penn, and it's very uncensored.
And Sean Penn joins me now.
Sean, great to see you.
It's been quite a while, 10 years, I think, since I last interviewed you.
Yeah, not that.
We're in a world of self-identity.
Are you here identifying as an actor, a humanitarian, an activist, or something else?
I suppose I'm here identifying as somebody who'd like to get eyes and ears on this film superpower and a continued conversation on our obligations to Ukraine.
The film, I've watched it twice.
I think it's a great film.
Thank you.
And it couldn't be more timely because due to events in the Middle East with the Israel-Hamas war, a lot of global attention has moved away from Ukraine.
And President Zelensky, who I know you know well, and I went to a Kyiv and interviewed him myself, is very concerned that while the world looks away, Vladimir Putin will accelerate his attempt to effectively take as much of Ukraine as he can get.
How perilous do you think this moment is for Ukraine?
I think the way I equate it is how perilous is it for mankind in our general mission focus, be that with our families or with the world at large?
There are not too many distractions available to get us off course if we don't let there be.
The concerns in the Middle East are of course very real and great.
But with the principles intact that those in the world who believe in freedom, whether you call it democracy or something else, we're not given more to do than we're able to do.
And I think it's just the micro stuff and the breaking down of each other in all of this is really the distraction that we should worry about.
Obviously, that's manipulated by enemies.
It was never, I never felt that, for example, President Putin's trip to Tehran was strictly about drones.
And I do believe that there was an influence on what happened October 7th in Gaza, in Israel, that that too was influenced by this.
So these things have connections and so to defeat those things or for freedom to triumph is to be able to maintain focus on both and the other issues of the day.
Do you see parallels between what's happening in Israel and Gaza and the Ukraine-Russia war?
Well, of course, there are certain parallels.
You know, the wanton disregard for and in fact proactive attack on civilians, on children, on infrastructure.
And the biggest parallel I suppose, the one I think we could spend our time most productively focusing on is the way in which, and this extends to so much else, the way in which nuance is not allowed into the conversation.
Now, what's not a parallel in the case of, you know, what's not nuanced at all in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, or rather Russia's criminal invasion of Ukraine, is that's a very unambiguous set of circumstances.
It's a very clear black hat involved here, a black hat against all our human principles with Russia's horrible and misguided invasion and all the murder and all of the taking of children and re-educating of children to hate their parents and their country and things we just shouldn't stand for as any single section of it.
My sense is that, and I'm not an expert on the Middle East, but my sense is certainly that they're, with the horror of what Hamas has done, that to get to a productive result for Jews, for Israelis, for Arabs in Israel, for Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank and around the Middle East, we might not like it, but it's going to take a very nuanced conversation and the sooner we get to it, the better.
And the more push there is or resistance to that conversation, the legacy will be that those who pushed against the nuanced conversation would have been the ones to have extended the problem.
You recently told Variety Magazine before what's just blown up in the Middle East, if you'd been U.S. president after 9-11, you'd have done things differently.
You said, if I have to go to prison, I'll go, but I'm going to kill them.
I'm killing everyone that did this, but only them.
And we know where the effers they are, where the F they are.
In the context of that gut response that you had to 9-11, do you understand why Israel has reacted the way it's done, even if you don't endorse it?
But do you understand their desire, their fervent need as a country to go after Hamas and eliminate the people that perpetrated the terror attack?
Were Hamas living in remote mountains of Tora Bora, I would have absolutely understood it.
But when you have a place like, you know, topographically similar, let's say it's Malibu, California in size and scope, and although 100 times more populated, you know, when we think of Gaza, we do have to understand, without taking aside, being a defender, apologist for anything, those children are hearing every gunshot throughout the country, are feeling every ordinance that drops.
This is 24-7.
This is a tiny place packed with people.
That's very different.
I would say absolutely, I would like to see Hamas evaporated in mountains like Tora Bora, as perhaps could have al-Qaeda at that time.
If you do a constant bombardment for many weeks, is the way the Israelis have done, you're going to kill thousands and thousands of completely innocent children.
And I find that morally repugnant that that's happening.
And yet I defend their moral right to go after Hamas.
It's a really, it's a difficult situation, isn't it?
It's very difficult, of course, one house to be very aware.
You know, that could have been my daughter or son at that music festival, for example.
I mean, I understand the immediate reaction to that, even the long-term reaction to it.
But again, we do have to also say, well, it's somebody else's children next time.
And when I brought up, when I said that I felt that, you know, that I had a dream that President Bush might just say, I'm sending the White House Council home.
This has to be done.
We'll suffer the consequences later in Torbor with al-Qaeda.
I also said that having done that, he might have licensed himself to then go back in time and say, in what ways?
Again, we know these are the kind of things that people love to chew apart.
In what ways did we was were we complicit in the poverty, in the hopelessness, in the oppression of a people somewhere else, in the lack of inclusivity of those people that contributed to that hatred that came our way.
So in this case, too, there are the big differences.
One is the civilian population of Gaza, and the other is that we are told not to speak about the accountability of Israel and the United States in their support of Israel, in many ways unconditional support.
And, you know, I'm a 48% Ashkenazi Jew.
I have nothing but love for my ancestry and ancestors.
That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that I think that while Israel's people were criminally, horrifyingly attacked, that Israel also has a prime minister who is a terror by any measure of basic political thinking.
That's bad timing.
You think he's an actual terrorist, Netanyahu?
Well, I didn't say terrorist.
I wouldn't necessarily jump to say that because I think I don't know that he's trying to create terror so much as he's trying to create an inflated sense of his own worth in his time.
Your father, the action director Leo Penn, as you said, an American Jew of Eastern European descent, also a highly decorated war veteran.
He served as a tailgunner and bombardier in the B-24 Liberator with the U.S. Air Force in World War II, actually stationed here in England.
And of course was fighting the Nazis, which were an existential threat to civilization at the time.
You know, many Israelis say what they're going through now is the worst existential threat to what happened to them in the Holocaust.
Your dad was an amazing guy.
Life expectancy for the role that he played in that war was seven missions.
He did 37.
He did.
Is that where you get this warrior spirit from?
I would only aspire to it.
I've never been tested like that.
Yeah, but he is the hero in my experience here.
What would he, do you think, have made of what's happening now with Israel?
And what advice would he give them, do you think, to try and get to a better place?
My dad used to have an expression when I would come home very opinionated on one issue or another and very angry at anyone who believed differently.
He would say, you know, everyone has their own truth, kid.
And I think his advice would be for people to recognize what is true of each other's position.
And then it's also important to recognize what is a lie that group thinkers tell themselves to be comfortable and to have a group and an identity.
And I think this extends again to the broader cultural picture of a lot of what's distracting from us getting down to the things that will help our world be better.
Recognizing Each Other's Truths 00:10:51
You've been very scathing of America's lack of what you think is proper support, particularly with Ukraine with regard to their ability to control the air.
You would like to have seen America supply F-16 fighters and so on.
Why do you feel so strongly about that?
We need to step up.
Every day is another opportunity.
The Ukrainians are certainly ready to fight the fight.
They've never asked for our troops to be on the ground or in the air.
And there's been a lot of sort of smoke and mirror talk about how long it would take, whether there were the maintenance crews available.
There's actually been workarounds available on that from the very beginning.
And within the first months of the war, there could have been F-16s without...
Also, there's a betrayal of the Ukrainians with nuclear weapons.
We made them give theirs up.
If they had had those nuclear weapons, I don't think Putin would have countenanced invading.
But he knew he could invade a non-nuclear power with impunity.
But if they'd been able to keep their weapons, they wouldn't have been a non-nuclear power.
And Americans should know, particularly, you know, we did sign the Budapest Memorandum.
And that did assure Ukraine that if they gave up those weapons, Russia, the United States, and the others involved would never even threaten intervention or violence against the country.
I've got a clip.
This is from the 2001 Moscow Film Festival.
You and Jack Nicholson actually meeting Vladimir Putin.
Have you been to Russia?
In 2001, Jack Nicholson and I had a film at the Moscow Film Festival.
That night has become a deviant memory.
A deviant memory.
What is your memory of that meeting?
I remember this was approximately two weeks after the famous meeting between President Bush and Putin, where President Bush said something like, you know, I looked him in the eye and I knew we could trust him.
I didn't come away with a great, I don't mean a good or bad impression, a deep impression at the time.
He was, you know, a bit of a poker-faced fellow, talked about his kids.
There were no politics discussed per se, but when I talk about it as a deviant memory, I look at that.
And now, you know, world head of state aside, world politics aside, I'm looking at somebody who's, you know, cutting off babies' heads.
I don't like having been next to that.
I don't know if you've got it on you now, but for a long time you carried a card in your wallet by the great Armenian-American author, William Sarain.
And there was a quote from this, I think, part of a lengthier quote, but there's a bit that says, despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil.
These understand.
Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.
It's a powerful quote.
It is, yeah.
I don't think I knew what it meant really until, like I said, as you said, I carried that around forever.
It made some visceral impact on me, and I could tell, I could recognize the kind of the rhythm of the thoughts in a way that was provocative, more provocative, say, than anything I'd read in a short form like that.
And so I kept it with me, thinking I knew what it meant, but sort of like the way an onion gets peeled.
It wasn't until I got to Ukraine where I really felt like, okay, now I understand this thing.
Does any part of you understand, as he wrote there, about Putin, clearly a man of evil, many would say.
I certainly would.
But if you're playing devil's advocate, trying to get into his brain, do you understand why this guy thought the breakup of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that's ever happened to his country, felt like the NATO encroachment, as he saw it, closer and closer to the Russian border, was a threat to the Russian people.
I mean, does any part of that make any sense to you, or do you think it's just an excuse for his land grab?
It's what I call kind of the bulb-no bulb people.
You see the light of humanity in some people.
So whatever the sort of speculation is, and I've read some of the histories of Putin and seen some of the documentaries, and I've certainly listened to better brains than mine talk about that and sort of analyze him.
I think essentially what this is, is an unimaginative person, someone whose bulb either never got fully put on and therefore was not distracted by the colors of life that the rest of us embrace.
Donald Trump says he would resolve this war in 24 hours.
I think in the United States, Donald Trump is guilty most of being an adolescent influencer of cheap thought.
And cheap thought is very expensive.
Again, I go back to what America should be searching for in a Democrat or a Republican.
It's an aspirational figure, not someone you hang your lowest denominator on.
You went on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News, which I thought was a really interesting moment.
When you did that, that's a big deal for you to do that.
You're going into what I guess would have been historically a kind of media enemy's lair.
But you were prepared to do that, to have that debate.
And it was a very interesting interview, actually.
While there's incredible influence by media figures, by political figures, if somebody has had no experience with real bomb throwers, perhaps they should hold that phrase and come up with something more particular to what their concern is.
Because it just makes it, again, it's exaggerated or just a perversion of what's really going on.
I don't know about you, but most people I talk to, once you get it off the standard conversation of policy or personality, around the world, they want the same thing.
They want a better world for themselves and their family tomorrow.
They want education for their kids.
It's the most common.
And they can be quite reasonable.
However unreasonable they may have sounded, when you get past that, you can have what used to be perfectly normal conversation in a free democratic society.
But now we're in a world where cancel culture is a very real thing.
And you know better than anyone the dangers of this.
What happened to your father, who was ostracized by Hollywood when he wouldn't throw his friends under the bus when there was that huge, you know, what was it, the big investigation into whether they were communists or whatever it may be.
He refused to take part in that and he never really got his career back as a result.
That was cancel culture.
And of course he played Harvey Milk.
Again, a perfect illustration of what a world can do, what it was to cancel people.
Now it's so much more prevalent now.
It's like people get cancelled for having an opinion, just saying what they honestly believe about stuff.
How have we got there?
I say I would, you know, I'm a little bit borrowing from Stephen Fry here.
He gives this great closing argument at the end of a month debate on political correctness.
And I think maybe, and it will seem ironic that I respond this way, maybe we've taken ourselves too seriously.
Have you included?
Perhaps at the forefront many times.
You said that you fly a big American and Ukrainian flag at your home in Malibu.
You said, I'm a big proponent of the idea we start waving flags again, even if we're on the left.
And we don't worry that our neighbors are going to think we suddenly became a MAGA hawk, which is what some of my friends accuse me of.
Just for having an American flag flying.
Yeah, but again.
That apparently is now offensive.
The left, the left.
A lot of friends of mine, well, you know, we've got to take the flag back, or we got to share it again.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, that countries find true unity often in the worst possible circumstance.
I felt that when I went to New York after 9-11, it felt like the whole country was united in that moment, in a way I hadn't seen America probably in my lifetime.
Similarly, I think, you know, you had the same experience with Haiti and how the Haitians came together.
I certainly felt it, and I think you did in Ukraine, that the Ukrainian people were just almost completely as one in their desire to save their country, preserve their freedom, back their president.
That wasn't the case before the war started.
No, but all the more, I mean, as important as our support of them to dominate this, to return their freedom and sovereignty to themselves and to rebuild their country, is the long-term plan.
This is the opportunity for mankind, for all free thinkers.
Why can't we unify this?
That we remember that once that's resolved, we have to have the spirit and resources in place for it to be the example of it continuing beyond them unified under war.
That was the question I was going to ask.
That's the leading example.
Why do we find it so hard to continue the unity when we get back to a more peaceful time?
I think unities are cannibalized first by those who are promoting unity.
I think things blow up from the inside of an idea.
And I think even in the case of Russia after 1994, I remember the relief.
The Cold War is over.
People are dancing.
I don't think we ever looked back and noticed that the Russians were not feeling the relief that the world was feeling.
And that gangsterism had replaced communism.
And the breadlines were just as long.
And things didn't get better for them.
And you let that happen over time and somebody like Putin is able to come back, take power, and do what he's doing.
We need strong leadership, never more so than from America.
Does it worry you the thought that Trump may win again?
Because nothing they're throwing at him seems to make any difference.
In fact, it all seems to increase his popularity, all these indictments and so on.
Putin and the Need for Leadership 00:12:12
I know there's a lot of speculation that he may and a lot of speculation that he may not.
I think that my concern would, if I could, I'd like an x-ray of who we are in America today.
Is that really possible?
Because before Trump, that would be the problem.
If we're still ready to let everything we stand for and everything my father's generation and those before stood for, and I don't mean that they accomplished all their tasks for everybody, we know that never happened and that we hope it still can.
But if we go soft and yellow and decide we're going to let it go and let this guy, as Judge Souter once said, take the ball and roll with it, then I'm going to have to find my pride in a glass of vodka.
Might take more than one glass of vodka, sure.
Let's talk about superpower.
It's fascinating to me that this began, this movie, as a much lighter film that you wanted to make about this extraordinary story of a guy who was an actor, a comedic actor predominantly.
You know, he'd been seen playing the piano with his penis on a special on TV for the delectation of Ukrainian people, and they all laughed.
Then he takes part in this series called Servant of the People, where as a comedic actor, he ends up becoming president of Ukraine.
Right.
And we've got a clip.
Such a powerful clip, that, because it's so prescient.
Because this guy then becomes the real president of Ukraine and very quickly has a very bad guy and other bad guys coming to take his country.
And in that moment, your whole film that you've been making, which is a light, fun look at a guy who's a comedy actor and you're an actor and you think, this is fun.
And then it gets incredibly serious.
And you, as a filmmaker, you as an actor, what did you make of all this?
Well, personally, it's one more time where I can say, you know, I try to be light.
Pull me back in.
You know, here we really do.
Albertino and Godfather Fred suck me back in.
You know, it's interesting.
I take it back a little bit to when we're talking about President Biden.
This is somebody who has been an extraordinary person of service for so long, understands the game very deeply, the process, the bureaucratic process.
And I think has a lot to offer.
This situation was, it was so, you know, we met President Zelensky the first time.
I had said, because of what I thought could be a value-added documentary that I could make versus some accomplished documentarian or journalist, that it's always been a kind of a trust and trustworthiness bond, and maybe it would be a different kind of conversation.
And therefore, I didn't want to have a camera available the first time we met face to face.
And it was just a crazy coincidence of timing that we met the first time on the 23rd without a camera.
Literally the day before the war starts.
Right.
And agreed that on the 24th, we'd do our first session with the camera.
And unbelievably, he sees you.
He fulfilled the commitment despite the rockets coming in.
We've got a clip of this.
He wants us to be dead.
He hates you.
He hates us.
We don't know why.
I mean, it's incredible.
The war starts and he takes time to see you.
And no offense, Sean Penn, you're an actor.
Are you surprised he kept that meeting?
And why do you think he did?
I was surprised.
Of course I was surprised.
You know, we were all processing the tragedy of this unimaginable decision of Putin's.
Today I understand it better.
I think he's very savvy.
I think that any opportunity to have a record of I think he believed in what he was going to do and what his people were going to do.
So much so that in a country at war, we were never watched over when we were shooting.
We never had a minder.
There was never a word of influencing anything.
He knew how important America would be and he thought using a Hollywood superstar, multiple Oscar winner, would shine a light right when he needed it to get help from America.
That's a guy who understands the media, understands politics, possibly from playing a president in a comedy.
I mean, it's surreal the way you guys came together like this.
Yeah, and another way to look at it is, you know, when I'm, remember, I've been very focused and had a lot of responsibility.
I'm not comparing it to the responsibility he has, but I've had responsibilities in certain situations to a lot of people and sometimes to their physical well-being.
And, you know, you do find that moment where your bandwidth needs to step outside and have a cigarette.
It may be that, you know, he used this opportunity.
Obviously, he stepped outside and essentially had a cigarette.
You know, it doesn't mean that it's like he took time out of fighting a war.
He was also Sean at the time, on that day, the number one target in the country for Putin.
It was a moment when you go to the front line.
This is about four months later.
And a woman says this to you.
It's about 10 kilometers from zero position.
That's the priority.
Can I be very blunt?
You're Sean Penn.
Nobody's going to be responsible for you dying on the front line.
I mean, that's the moment when you hear that, because that's completely true.
The front line doesn't care who you are or how many Oscars you've won.
You end up 150 meters away from Russians across the river, notwithstanding you've been in a few hairy situations in your life.
That must have been a seriously unnerving moment, wasn't it?
Of course, I took a deep breath at some point before we went in, but I also felt that, you know, and what's here, I think quite graciously, that voice who was working as a translator with us, she offered an abundance of caution.
But again, it's almost an embarrassing thing.
I understand the question, and there's some versions of this I could say differently, but when I think of people who are staying there in that fight, versus parachuting in for a second and getting a little bit of a story and going out, I don't really know how to talk about that.
There's a moment when you go to an apartment block.
This is in your first visit after the war started in June.
And you see the devastation for yourself of an airstrike that had happened just a few hours before.
And what was particularly telling for me as I watched you do this was I suddenly realized that this was the same apartment block I'd gone to a month after you when I did a show or two shows from Kyiv and walked in, I'm pretty sure, the same apartment block.
And I don't know how you felt when I was, but I felt just, I'd never been in that kind of, I'm not a war correspondent.
I don't normally go to places like this.
And just to see the utter devastation of just, in that case, one person's life.
It's not just frontline soldier to soldier.
It is the constant barrage of civilian life and ordinary people.
All the families that have been separated for two years while the men's day to fight the fight or support the fight in country and the mothers and the children who are spread out all over the world, some who would no promise of anywhere or anything to go or any support.
And in some cases, getting otherworldly support.
Poland in particular was, both the civilians and the leadership were extraordinary toward them.
But still, that's walking out into a brave new world and just worrying every day about your brother or your father, son who's in the fight.
You dedicate the film to Ukrainian fighter pilot known as Juice.
He was the leader of the fabled Ghost of Kiev unit, which didn't actually exist in the way people thought, but he was an unbelievably good pilot.
And he very sadly died three months ago in a training exercise.
You see in the movie, you take him to see Top Gun Maverick.
He's a real life Top Gun.
You saw it in Washington.
We were lobbying for F-16 jets.
And he's now one of the 100,000 Ukrainians who've died in this war, including, I think, 13,000 civilians.
Tell me about him for a moment.
I mean, the impact he had on your life.
Well, I like to say we became friends.
We kept in touch after we spent time in Washington.
I might, you know, we'd be on an encrypted line that he was okay with.
And I might, you know, say, hey, you know, what's happening?
He said, just about to go wheels up.
And he'd be, because they were constantly in the fight.
He was a very poetic creature, you know, not what you would expect of a Top Gun, essentially Top Gun fighter pilot.
He was a great leader.
He's a guy who believed he owed his country service.
He's not, he was a, yeah, sort of personality was the furthest thing you'd think from a military man and a beautiful spirit and great humor heat.
You know, most people know that movie, Top Gun Maverick, and when we were watching it in DC, I was sitting next to him, and he leaned over at one point after Tom Cruise had ejected and found his way in his dusty flight suit to the diner.
And he leaned over and he said, that's why I always take my wallet.
How did you find out that he died?
So somebody I know, I don't know if he would mind my saying his name, you can assume who it is.
Let's say the civilian now, someone who had worked in government, who would have known anything the New York Times knew by the time the New York Times knew, anything where you collect open source material.
And a very credible person called me middle of the night and said, no, because I'd introduced the two of them in DC and knew that I would want to know and said this happened.
And then I double-checked it with the Ministry of Defense in Ukraine and they came back and said, yeah.
Processing Loss During War 00:07:21
Sad moment for you.
Yeah.
Well, he's it.
But sort of like what you're talking about with the apartment, right?
It's personalized.
Yeah.
And it's personalized tens of thousands of times.
You were angry when the Academy, just after the war blew up, decided not to let Zelensky speak at the Oscars.
And then, of course, that Oscars became known for the Will Smith Chris Rock punch-up on stage, which you don't think would have happened if Zelensky had been allowed to speak, because the idea of someone then committing an act of violence publicly at the same event would have been unthinkable.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, look.
There was, what are films?
You know, it's not just the celluloid you print them on.
It's bigger medicine than that.
You know, it can be.
And so they're ideas.
They're stories.
What more cinematic idea or story is there or more identified with film?
A film star, also, a filmmaker, Zelensky.
What's more appropriate at that moment in time to address the Academy Awards?
He had no intention of being partisan politics in the United States.
It was really to talk about the value of cinema and to thank all of those around the world that were supporting and the Academy.
That's what he would have shared.
And that they traded that for, I guess, the karma of what happened with Will Smith.
You know, you look at Will Smith, whose performance was great.
That's King Richard.
Why?
Amazing.
This petty kind of thing happens.
I was back on a part of the trip that was more related to my organization core back in Ukraine at this point in Lviv when that happened.
And I, you know, literally, I felt it feels, no, I wasn't watching it, but I heard about it in the morning after and saw the clip.
And I literally felt something like safer in Ukraine than Hollywood watching it, you know, mentally.
It just seemed so small.
And when you, in your earlier incarnation, punched somebody, you got a 60-day jail sentence, served half of it in prison.
Will Smith goes back up to receive the best actor award after whacking somebody at the Oscars live and gets an ovation from the audience.
Yeah, that ovation should be, that should be played on this show a lot of times because shame on them.
You know, it's, so yeah, I just felt that that was a very low moment in whatever.
The leadership of the Academy in denying this thing having to, you know, or the producer of that particular show being of such lack of substance, it was discouraging, yeah.
You were so angry about this.
You wanted to melt down your two Oscars, the bullets, for Ukrainian soldiers to use against the Russians.
And in the end, you didn't do it, but you gave one of your Oscars to President Zelensky, but on loan, and you said, when this war's over, bring it back to Malibu.
We've got a clip of what you'd like to do when you see him after this war ends.
I hope, I really hope, that when he's an old man, and I'm an even older one, that I might be sitting with him in a peaceful and prosperous free Kyiv, laughing like a couple of kids at what William Saroyan called the infinite delight and mystery of life.
It's a lovely thought, but you must have had quite a few moments, not least when you left Kyiv that first time on the day war had broken out, and you were able to leave and he was left there, that you might never see him again.
Of course.
Yeah, it creeped up on me by surprise because, you know, when you're in it, when you meet somebody who's in circumstances that reasonably could end in any way, any way you can imagine, and where there were such clear intentions by, you know, it's understood that there were Chechen kill squads in the streets of Kyiv who were targeting him and his family at that time.
So it was coming at it from all angles, the potential targeting of government buildings, snipers, everything.
And that he was this target, you know, you make a decision faster, emotionally.
And I recognize my affection for him.
So I felt, I can't speak for him in this.
He had a lot of things to respond to.
But I felt a friendship, at least from my side, like a bond.
And when we left, it suddenly hit me.
What did I do that for?
What did I open myself up to that for?
And it was a real worry.
Has he seen the movie?
Yeah.
As a filmmaker, he had the patience to watch the whole thing.
And so we walked into the office.
This is sometime after, I don't know, we'd made several trips.
I'd seen him several times before this.
And this was the trip we were making to show him a rough cut for the first time.
And so he saw it sometime between six and seven o'clock in the morning before starting his day.
And we saw him at about four in the afternoon.
And when we came into the office, he's standing there looking at me and he said, I'll bet you're glad I watched the whole thing.
I bet you weren't, too.
Yeah, I was.
I was.
Because you've been accused, obviously, there's too much of you in the movie and so on, but you make a joke of that several times, you know, about you're not trying to be Walter Cronki and they liken you to Ralda Reer and so on.
You're seeing that joke, but at the same time, you're also aware you wouldn't have got the movie off first base if you weren't front and center with this.
It wouldn't have happened.
Yeah, and again, it had to do with recognizing, and this was a process.
First, there was, we couldn't get the financing if I wasn't on camera.
Very hard, these movies.
Now, there's a great movie called Freedom on Fire, which is a companion piece to Winter on Fire by Evgenia Avenusky, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Winter on Fire about the Maidan Revolution.
And he hasn't been able to get a distributor for this thing because these kinds of films are very difficult right now.
Returning to Acting After Addiction 00:04:41
I think he just showed it at the Vatican to the Pope, and hopefully some traction will come off of that.
So for us to get this thing done required me being in it.
Then, you know, I felt like, again, it was saying, what's the value added?
And of course, I can be mocked in whatever way, but I do think we were really successful, despite in the truth of how people can benefit from this thing, by offering myself to it in a way that is kind of like, it's kind of one of the, so like I say here, I've gotten access to people and things that I know wouldn't have come without my day job supporting that.
And financially as well as in terms of access to people.
And that normally, though it might not seem it to people because it gets covered, I have tried to avoid covering those trips and what I'm actually doing.
I thought this time I'm going to let people come with me.
And in the editing, it was really important to me.
I was, you know, I make it clear, I have opinions.
Big surprise.
You've been dipping your toe back into acting again.
And you did say five years ago, I'm not in love with that anymore about acting.
Are you falling a bit back in love with it again?
Well, I had an experience that surprised me.
Yeah.
I did a movie called Daddy O with Dakota Johnson, directed and written by a woman named Christy Hall.
And it was kind of a gift of a piece, just really wonderfully written thing.
And I hate admitting this part of it, but it was all run by women.
Better than other jobs I'd been on.
Really?
And...
You sound surprised, sure.
No, just, you know, embittered of my original intent to be, you know, misogynist my whole life.
What do you think of the current world we live in where people no longer want to say what a woman is for fear of being cancelled?
I'm bored with it.
I think let's talk about that when people aren't being vaporized on the front lines of wars.
And, you know, I'll stay out of judgment on it, but I'm not engaged in the conversation.
It just seems not like the priority.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about was the very sad death of Matthew Perry, because you appeared in several episodes of Friends.
And he suffered from a lot of addiction issues.
He wrote an incredible book about it, one of the most powerful books I've read.
Your son Hooper had addiction issues, and you've talked about that.
He said you saved his life.
Your thoughts about Matthew?
What a talented guy.
I can't claim to have known him well, but I liked him very much.
I saw him somewhat recently, and we were both catching a flight out of Los Angeles airport, and I complimented him on what I knew of his book.
I hadn't read the book.
I had seen several of his interviews, and he seemed to be talking about, had confronted it and was very intelligent and bold about it and generously offering his experience to people to be helpful.
It's tragic.
I can't say that I was terribly surprised.
I don't know what the whole coroner's report thinks and everything, but I know he had done a lot of damage to his organs over the years.
Tough situation.
And he got to do that.
He got to leave that tale behind.
And he got to give a lot of joy to a lot of people with his talent.
And so, I wish his family well.
I've tried to maintain the highest standards of journalism for this interview because you said recently, I still don't like journalism that focuses on what toilet paper celebrities use.
Out of interest, what toilet paper do you use?
I've got a rule of Putin-face paper.
Have you really?
Yeah, somebody gave it to me.
Yeah.
You see, sometimes it's those questions that get the best answers.
And the other thing I couldn't help but notice, because you turned up with her here, is you have a new lady in your life, Olga, and she's Ukrainian.
How did you guys meet?
My good luck.
She's here.
She is.
Shall I get her into ours?
No.
But you're happy.
Yeah, very happy.
Sean, it's good to see you again.
Great to see you.
Let's not leave us along this
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