When actor Sean Penn appeared as a guest on Sean Hannity’s show, the Academy-Award winner found himself unable to dodge a question that had clearly been plaguing the Fox News host with curiosity.
Before Penn had agreed to come on Hannity to discuss Ukraine, a country the 61-year-old filmmaker had been in and out of for the past few months as part of a documentary he’s working on about the ongoing war, he’d given Hannity an answer he likely didn’t want to hear.
“I don’t trust ya,” Penn said, resharing with the Fox host’s audience what he’d first told Hannity on the phone earlier.
“Is there a reason you didn’t trust me?” Hannity asked on Tuesday night’s show, while stifling back a chortling laugh.
“There’s a lot of reasons I don’t trust you,” the actor replied, appearing to be undisturbed from the awkwardness of the question.
Despite Penn’s initial misgivings, he eventually conceded to go on Hannity’s programme, telling the host that he felt motivated to rise above “his lack of trust” to discuss an issue he felt deserved more attention, regardless of his personal gripes.
“I don’t think that I’ve got time to indulge my lack of trust, which becomes a petty thing as people, and babies, are being vaporised," Penn told the Fox host after more prodding.
“And that these people are fighting for the very dreams that are the aspirations of all of us Americans. We talked about that, too, and we agreed on that.”
As the actor continued to discuss his travels back to the war torn country, and a meeting he had with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky back in the fall, Hannity interrupted to inquire: “Did you trust him?”
Penn, at this point, decided to give Hannity a more than above the surface scratching as to why he distrusted the host, and replied: “I didn’t have the baggage with him I have with you.”
The baggage in question that Penn was referring to, which he went on to refresh his host’s memory of, was an incident in 2007 when the Fox host labelled him an “enemy of the state” for critiques the actor levelled against the Bush administration.
Again attempting to dodge any further confrontation over the matter, and perhaps in hopes of keeping his host on topic, Penn added that he wears the comment as a “badge of honour” now.
“As a badge of honour at my house … I got the full screen that I dominate as an enemy of the state with you in the foreground.”
Before the Fox host let Penn leave, however, he took one last shot at getting the actor to reveal why he doesn’t trust him, leading the interrogated man to lean on a heavy-handed metaphor to placate Hannity.
“You know what happens is that there’s a lot of physical therapy necessary after a big car accident,” he said. “You don’t get it all done in a day.”
Later on that night, Penn appeared on MSNBC’s The Last Word to continue to preach his message of “unity” and praise Ukraine’s war-time leader for his bravery.
“Part of what makes him so, so particularly extraordinary is that in that courage, he’s the face of so many Ukrainians,” Penn said during an interview where he contended with notably less distraction.
“We’ve got to get back on track together,” he added before calling for unity within the US. “Ukraine, with all its diversity, has a unity we’ve never seen in modern times with the challenge it has.”
