The actor opened up about why he didn't attend the recent 98th Academy Awards
Credit: Rebecca Sapp/Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Sean Penn shared that he no longer attends awards shows because they trigger his anxiety
- Penn opened up about his mental health in a conversation with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at New York City’s Spring Studios during Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, June 5
- The actor explained that he skipped the recent 98th Academy Awards because they felt “dread-provoking” to him
Sean Penn is opening up about his decision to skip the 98th Academy Awards, where he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
“It's not just [that it's] an awards show,” the One Battle After Another actor, 65, said of the Oscars, in conversation with CNN's Kaitlan Collins on Friday, June 5 during Tribeca Film Festival, per Variety.
Penn went on to share that awards shows represent "social discomfort" for him and "too many people." “It would be the same if this group was going to an afterparty and one stepped into that," Penn explained. "I'm now down, committed for life, that I won't go anywhere to be in a designated group beyond eight people.”
Penn added that he feels these events only “give you 15 minutes per person,” which triggers his anxiety and is “dread-provoking."
“The two times I had gone [to the Oscars], I felt relief that I'd won because so many people out there had worked really hard for that,” he told Collins, per the outlet. “There's the politics of that stuff.” Penn previously won Best Actor Oscars for his performances in 2008's Milk and 2003's Mystic River.
Penn said he told his One Battle After Another costars that not attending would be "better for my mental health," and he instead traveled to Ukraine's capital of Kyiv to support the nation amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War, where he received a different honor — an Oscar statuette made of metal from a train damaged in the war, presented to him by Ukrainian Railways' Oleksandr Pertsovskyi on March 17.
“I really got to enjoy the Academy Awards for the first time,” he said during the interview of watching the ceremony from afar. “It was great.”
Penn said he made the decision to quit attending awards shows in person earlier this year. “The best that I could ever muster was relief,” Penn continued. “Knowing that I wasn't going to do that anymore, I did one before that this year. I went to the Golden Globes; I'd never been to that before. And that's where I decided, ‘I can't do this.'”
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He went on to describe his distaste for fans wanting selfies with him during awards ceremonies and beyond.
“People should not do selfies ever with anyone," Penn said. "It's bad for you; it's bad for everyone. It's a soul-sucker. It's the Holocaust grandmother and her 6-year-old paraplegic wheeling over? It's a hard no.”
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