Sean Penn, never one to mince words, says that Dakota Johnson saved him after years spent miserable on movie sets. His disillusion, stretching back over 15 years, ebbed away when Johnson knocked on his door with a script for a film she planned to make. Would he want to star in it alongside her? “No reservations at all,” Penn told the Associated Press recently. “I felt like you would feel getting your first movie.” Ahead of Daddio’s theatrical premiere on Friday, the actor’s press tour has also included a pitstop at The New York Times, where he spun Maureen Dowd a similar tale of woe earlier this month. “I went 15 years miserable on sets,” Penn recalled. “Milk was the last time I had a good time.” When Dowd wondered aloud if Penn could still play the assassinated gay lawmaker Harvey Milk in a biopic today, he grouched that it seemed unlikely—and not just because he’s, you know, now 63 years old. “It could not happen in a time like this,” the actor declared. “It’s a time of tremendous overreach. It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.”
