A Leader of the ‘90s Pack Reflects on the Art of Acting

A night in the recent life of Sean Penn, actor, son, director, husband, movie star, father, celebrity:

The students file in with first-night expectation, squinting into the television lights, shifting seats to find the best sight line and the best chance of appearing on camera.

Offstage, Sean Penn is reported calm, his wife and frequent co-star, actress Robin Wright Penn, nervous. She’ll sit with the audience for that night’s taping of the Bravo series “Inside the Actors Studio.” Host James Lipton has his stack of blue file cards ready to draw her husband into who-knows-what subjects, and the prospect of a spontaneous Sean Penn in a rare television appearance may be making her a little wary.

But Lipton introduces Penn as his generation’s Brando, Pacino, Hoffman and Hackman, and the guest appears calm and only slightly embarrassed by the standing ovation that greets him in his new role as icon.

Far from the edgy, short-fused, angry young man of acting, Penn sits quietly and thoughtfully. He lights up a cigarette--ah! the rebel is revealed--and draws applause. To honor his father, Actors Studio teacher Leo Penn, who died in September, he is made a member of the acting school. “It took Dustin Hoffman six auditions to make it in,” Lipton reminds him. “Nicholson needed five, Harvey Keitel 11.”

During the 90 minutes, which will be edited down to less than an hour when the program airs Feb. 28, Penn is encouraged to talk about himself.

His high school career plans: “I thought I was going to be a lawyer,” he says. “I certainly had enthusiasm for the nature of arguing.” It didn’t work out. “See, I thought homework was beneath me.”

His approach to acting: “You become a kind of journalist in your approach, initially, seeking out information from the people you’re going to play. You let it affect you, then keep going back and reading the script. What story are they telling? What can your choices be?”

On starring in two new movies, both out this week: In “Hurlyburly,” which opens today, he takes onto the big screen the same character he played onstage in 1989. “I felt a certain possession of that part.” In “The Thin Red Line,” which opened Wednesday, he worked for mysterious director Terrence Mallick. “He’s a really interesting guy, a really gentle guy, a real Southern gentleman. Terry ‘writes’ in the cutting room as much as with a typewriter. So you had to keep it simple.”

He refuses to deliver the word “dude” with the meaning he coined in his 1982 breakthrough movie, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” There is no menace in his voice; he’s not going to be provoked. In fact, he’ll do his impression of Woody Allen, with whom he’s currently working: “ ‘Uh . . . cut. You, you know what was wrong with that scene? Everything was wrong with that scene.’

“There is drama and poetry in people’s lives,” Penn tells his fellow actors in the audience, warning them about the excesses of Hollywood movies. “The danger of heightening the experience is that you walk out of a theater and you are more alone than before. There’s no excuse for a movie like that. . . . Find poetry without creating a world you cannot touch.”

And off the Penns go to a world we only read about in the gossip columns--a very late night at the very hot club Moomba, where, as Liz Smith will tell it later that week, De Niro shows up to congratulate Penn on his performance in “Hurlyburly.” So do Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who made “Dead Man Walking” with Penn. And Val Kilmer, and Babyface, and “Hurlyburly” co-stars Meg Ryan and Chazz Palminteri. And so on. . . .