Sean Penn — long known for his support of Russian, Cuban, and Venezuelan dictators — is doubling down on demanding vaccine mandates for all film crews as well as movie theaters.
Speaking to CNN’s Michael Smerconish about his latest film Flag Day this Saturday, the Academy Award-winning actor insisted that he only wants to perform in front of vaccinated audiences.
“I am so grateful that audiences — and yes, we’ll come around to that, I would request only vaccinated audiences — have an opportunity to see this theatrically,” Penn said. “It’s rare these days to have something that is exclusively theatrical. Eventually it will stream, and that’s a better time for the unvaccinated to see it, though I think I’ll probably offend them out of that choice.”
He added that he hopes the unvaccinated will stop going to theaters and also accused the unvaccinated of perpetrating violence on others, saying, “You can’t go around pointing a gun in somebody’s face, which is what it is when people are unvaccinated.”
Actor and activist Sean Penn says he believes Covid-19 vaccinations should be mandatory.
“You can't go around pointing a gun in somebody's face, which is what it is when people are unvaccinated,” he tells @smerconish. https://t.co/oKYltfCANn pic.twitter.com/4tfNWdobnh
— CNN (@CNN) August 21, 2021
Penn had made his position clear in July when he refused to return to the set of his Starz anthology series Gaslit until everyone on set cold prove they were vaccinated.
Soon after, when his film, Flag Day premiered this month at the Cannes Film Festival, Penn exclaimed, “I do request people who are not vaccinated don’t go to the cinemas. Stay home until you are convinced of these very clearly safe vaccines.”
Penn added that people who refuse to get vaccinated purposefully want harm to come to others.
“That’s part of why I think it should be mandatory,” he said. “A resistance that’s just based on a certain kind of… lack of imagination and understanding of anything that’s helpful to the human race, I’ve become very frustrated by that. But I can only work within my own bounds and say that, for me, it should be mandatory.”
“I didn’t want to feel complicit in something that was taking care of one group and not the other,” Penn added. “And I do believe that everyone should get vaccinated. I believe it should be mandatory, like turning your headlights on in the car at night.
Penn offered to help members of the Hollywood workforce to get vaccinated free of charge with his CORE organization.
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