OpinionMaureen Dowd

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By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Malibu, Calif.

Don’t mellow my harsh, dude.

I was coming to talk to Sean Penn, the notorious Hollywood hothead who helped launch the word “dude” into the American bloodstream when he played stoner surfer Jeff Spicoli in the 1982 classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

I was nervous because the Times photographer was already inside the Spanish-style ranch house with Penn, who has a history of throwing punches at paparazzi. I hurried past Penn’s three surfboards and silver Airstream in the front yard, half expecting to see the un-pacific denizen of the Pacific Coast wrestling on the floor with the photographer.

Nah. Penn, in dark T-shirt, Columbia utility pants and sneakers, was charming, trailed by his adoring dogs, a golden retriever and a German shepherd rescue puppy.

When I joked that I was relieved to see him treating the photographer sweetly, he laughed. “When I did my 23andMe,” he said, “I thought I might be part Hopi because they don’t like to be photographed.”

Penn, a lifelong Malibu resident, pointed in the direction of his old grade school in the days of a more rural Malibu. He said he gets up at 5:30 a.m. and goes, barefoot, out to his wood shop. “I even forget to smoke for five hours.”

As it turns out, Penn has finally mellowed.

At 63, the weathered, tattooed rebel with many causes is a certified humanitarian — riding the crest into dangerous crises around the globe and saving lives in New Orleans and Haiti after disasters — and a crusading documentarian. He started out making the documentary “Superpower,” thinking it would be a story of how Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian, ascended to Ukraine’s presidency. But then Vladimir Putin pounced.

Penn ignored the warning of his friend Robert O’Brien, a national security adviser for former President Donald Trump, to “get the heck out of there,” and interviewed Zelensky in his bunker, hours after the invasion started. He also went to the front lines to dramatize for Americans the story of a young country protecting its democracy against an oppressor, to persuade them to help.

In 2013, Penn executed a rescue of Jacob Ostreicher, an American businessman rotting in a Bolivian prison after what Penn called a “corrupt prosecution.”

He went all Batman again when the Covid vaccines became available. His organization, CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort), set up a huge vaccine administration site outside Dodger Stadium.

Penn, still wiry but now sporting a shock of natural white hair with the sides shaved — a do he has for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie with Leonardo DiCaprio — took me on a tour of his house. On prominent display is a painting by Hunter Biden called “The Map,” the black outline of a head with colorful, detailed brushstrokes all around it. It’s a gift from the president’s son. Hunter, his wife, Melissa, and their son, Beau, had been over the night before.

Hunter painted it, Penn said, when he was “in pieces” and trying “to put the pieces back together.” Penn could relate.

He said the two met in 2022 when Penn gave a speech in honor of U2 at the Kennedy Center Honors. He had read an interview with Hunter, the first “since the chips were rolling down, and I was really taken with him and I told him.” Then last fall, after a screening of his Ukraine film with big shots on Capitol Hill, Penn had dinner with his friend Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who suggested he look up Hunter in Malibu.

“I had no idea he lived down here,” said Penn, adding dryly: “I thought he was off in some judicial-focused place that we see on TV.” He called Hunter “a very, very insightful guy.”

Penn also showed me the pump and hoses he keeps next to the pool. He has been en garde since the Malibu house he had shared with Madonna burned down in 1993.

We did the interview in his man cave, where he likes to serve vodka and talk about the world with his friends. There’s a cozy circle of blue chairs and a sofa and a plywood coffee table Penn made. The walls are chockablock with pictures and letters, including one from his friend Marlon Brando. There’s also a photo of Brando marching for civil rights.

The beach house is not your typical professionally decorated movie star manse. Penn has hung up photos of friends and his kids, actors Dylan, 33, and Hopper, 30, with his ex-wife Robin........

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