When a war breaks out between a nuclear superpower and a significantly smaller country who better to rush in than Sean Penn? The actor was on the ground the same week Ukraine was invaded but why? Well, he was doing the most Hollyweird thing he could think of and that was launching a documentary about the invasion.
Now, Penn was gone before things got really hairy but that didn’t stop him from trying to bring the people a little sizzle. In his trailer he claimed his friend Former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told him to “get the F*CK out” but was later corrected by O’Brien during an awkward exchange at a Q&A about the film.
Of course, the actor just shrugged it off stating that he was just ad-libbing.
Penn continued, “I was speaking to Robert [O’Brien] the whole time here. He knows the region much better than I do, and I made it. We … calculated that it would be fine, whatever happened. I don’t think anybody wanted to give up a level of denial that [the war] would happen because they would be giving up hope that [the invasion] wouldn’t happen.”
The actor then described meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and how he witnessed in a short period of time how the “world had changed.”
“We met with [Zelenskyy], a man in a suit, and the next morning the Russians invaded. We went back. We were with President Zelensky and waited for him at a meeting point. And the next time I saw him, he was in camos and the world had changed,” he said.
“Already a brutal mistake of lives taken and hearts broken, and if he doesn’t relent, I believe Mr. Putin will have made a most horrible mistake for all of humankind,” Penn told the Post in a statement. “President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have risen as historic symbols of courage and principle. Ukraine is the tip of the spear for the democratic embrace of dreams. If we allow it to fight alone, our soul as America is lost.”