Sean Penn "I Feel Very Alive"

The Oscar-winning actor on human resilience, humanitarian work, and his latest film, Black Flies

- James Mottram

For a man who doesn’t smile very often, Sean Penn is as close to beaming as it gets. It’s the day after the premiere of his new film Black Flies at the Cannes Film Festival and he’s still buzzing from the thunderous ovation it received. “I think the greatest thing that can happen for somebody in movies—as an actor, anyway—is when the core world of it [sweeps you up],” he says. “I’ve never been involved in a movie that succeeded more that way. And it allowed me to be just a pure audience [member] watching it.”

Given that Penn has been making movies since the early 1980s, when he co-starred alongside Tom Cruise as a military cadet in Taps, that’s quite a claim. Over time, he’s worked with some of the greatest filmmakers alive: Brian De Palma (Casualties of War, Carlito’s Way), Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life) and Kathryn Bigelow (The Weight of Water), to name but three. And he’s won several Oscars for his anguished father in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River and as a trailblazing gay San Francisco mayor in Milk.

You get the feeling this 63-year-old has seen it all. “Mind if I smoke?” he asks, blazing up an American Spirit (rest assured, vaping is not something Penn will ever entertain) when he enters the sixth floor terrace building of the Cannes Palais. Granite-faced, with piercing blue eyes and a wispy beard, his hair is short and tousled, a mix of grey and sandy-blonde. The voice is a nicotine-stained low rumble, seasoned by the Californian sun. “I will enunciate,” he promises.