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Sean Penn opened up to Esquire Magazine and talked about his marriage to Robin Wright although he never mentions her by name. “There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don’t feel I’ve ever had that. I have been the only one that was unaware of the fraud in a few of these circumstances blindly. When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and you go, What the fuck was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way? Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me.”
Penn goes on to say he went on to work on Haiti after his divorce and his sons skateboarding accident.
My son had a skateboard accident where he almost died. He had emergency brain surgery. This was before he turned eighteen — he’s nineteen now. And when he was recovering, seeing the morphine go into him and give him relief created kind of a love affair for me with morphine and that usage of it. It had already been eight months of divorce and shit, and raising a kid that’s going through the divorce himself, and then this fucking thing happens. He’s 100 percent now, no brain damage — he’s great. Got a few scars, but he’s great. But it was a tough, tough time. When he got out of the hospital and he’s with his mother after being with me for six months, I thought, Wow, I can actually go on a date. And so I go out and I strike out four nights in a row, drinking at a bar and ending up home, you know, drunk. And on the fourth day I said, “I could just go sit in the middle of the bed and watch TV at four in the afternoon, too. I don’t have anything.” My daughter’s eighteen and she’s doing her thing, my son’s with his mother. So I turned on the TV and there was this earthquake in Haiti.
One of the first reports I saw, they were doing trauma surgeries, amputations — children, with no IV pain medications. Now, my joke has always been that an actor in Hollywood knows where to find narcotics but not bulk narcotics. And they needed about 350,000 vials of morphine and ketamine. So I started putting a little ragtag team together to locate the drugs, and talked to the State Department and Southern Command to get a slot to land — the airport was crazy at that time. And that’s what got us there. But the road started with the most obvious kind of trauma — my son’s head — and then to get to a place that had been just so devastated and traumatized, and then to see that in fact most of the trauma actually predated the earthquake. You had a country that had never experienced anything that related to comfort, and out of that you had great trauma — but also this great strength that, I think, we all benefited from.
Penn and Wright married in 1996 and divorced in 2010 and share two children.
Photo from Esquire
