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 , that’s quite a claim. Over time, he’s worked with some of the greatest filmmakers alive: Brian De Palma (), Terrence Malick () and Kathryn Bigelow (), to name but three. And he’s won several Oscars and as a trailblazing gay San Francisco mayor in .
