Sean Penn, with daughter Dylan, directs again in ‘Flag Day’
Sean Penn is sort of done with movies.
He’s still making them, here and there. But Penn is mostly seeing out commitments he made years earlier. After those? He’s not so sure how much more he’s going to be acting or directing.
Penn, the 61-year-old maverick actor and sometimes filmmaker, is in many ways happily out of step with many of the prevailing winds in Hollywood.
Streaming films? Franchise movies? So-called “cancel culture?” All of these things draw his ire, to various degrees. Meanwhile, Penn is dedicating more of his time to Haitian relief efforts and getting people vaccinated than he does to movies.
All of that makes “Flag Day,” a new film Penn directed and co-stars in, a rarity for a once voracious actor who in the past decade has been a co-lead in only a few movies (”The Professor and the Madman,” “Gangster Squad”).
In the father-daughter drama, which MGM will release Friday in theaters, Penn plays a larger-than-life but often absent and sometimes imprisoned father to daughter Jennifer (played by Penn’s daughter Dylan Penn).
“I’m currently feeling with this movie incredibly lucky to have a movie that’s going to be a movie, that’s going to have a theatrical front,” Penn said in an interview last month. “I, as an audience, can be very into some of the things that are only streaming. But as a practitioner, not at all. To act in something, you take it in a certain stride. But as a director, the way I’ve always put it is: It’s not the girl I fell in love with.”
Penn increasingly sounds like someone for whom the romance of movies has faded. He misses Hollywood films that aren’t “just razzle-dazzle, Cirque du Soleil movies,” he says. On Marvel movies, he laments “how much it’s taken up the space and claimed so much time in the careers of so many talented people.”