Author: Corey Seymour / Source: Vogue
Let’s say this for Sean Penn: He lays it out there. Seemingly not content with slapping his name on a hundred or so theater and film productions as an actor, writer, producer, and director—along with a couple Best Actor Academy Awards—he’s published a host of righteous opinion pieces and worked as a war correspondent; he’s interviewed former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Cuban president Raúl Castro, and, famously, Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, better known as El Chapo. In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, Penn sprang into action with his boots-on-the-ground J/P Haitian Relief Organization, which continues to do lifesaving work on the island to this day.
More recently, he’s tossed aside the work for which he’s best known—acting—to establish himself as a first-time novelist with Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (Atria), a blisteringly funny, extremely garrulous dystopian picaresque about a septic-tank salesman with a side gig as a contract killer for the U.S. government that has drawn comparisons to great satirists of yore—and been described, in The New York Times, as “a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy.” The book has already provoked, of course, the expected variations on “don’t give up the day job” from critics (some of whom might be surprised to learn how similar their dismissals align with the likes of Laura Ingraham’s recent “shut up and dribble” comment to LeBron James). Penn himself, meanwhile, has found himself ridiculed for, among other things, his temerity in writing a #MeToo poem for the book—blissfully ignoring the rather Lit 101 possibility that maybe, just maybe, Penn and Bob Honey are not one and the same person.
With all this in mind, we thought it might be instructive to ring up Penn to see what he thought of all this.
Hi, Sean—how are you? Where are you?
Very well, thanks. I’m in Los Angeles, California, sitting on the couch in my kitchen.
Aren’t you supposed to be in the middle of some whirlwind, barnstorming book tour?
I’m in the middle of it—I’m on the home court here in L.A. for a day or two, and then I’m off to Austin next.
Does it feel different to have a book under your belt, as opposed to a finished screenplay or a film in the can?
It’s different in that you come to the end of a film project and you have sometimes benefitted from the collaboration of others, sometimes had to adjust things in ways that may not have been your ideal, but you might walk away proud anyway, or other times you may walk away with great disappointment, either based on failing ideas of your own or—statistically, much more likely—a collaborative effort that failed. I like standing on something that’s all mine and having no apologies to make and feeling complete.
But why write a book instead of a screenplay—is it because you just wanted to own this entirely, as you say, or is there something about the form that made this story need to be told in a book?
I’m gonna say it’s both—it was definitely time to recognize that I wasn’t enjoying playing well with others anymore, and that I really had a lot on my mind that I wanted to do or free up in ways that…
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