Well, the cat’s out of the bag: Sean Penn, 65, who recently told Vanity Fair that after his Oscar-winning turn in “One Battle After Another,” he’d be taking a break from acting to focus on directing his seventh feature, has lined up an A-list actor for the lead role.
It looks like Tom Hardy is no longer involved in Penn’s next film, despite Penn having mentioned his involvement last year. Instead, Bradley Cooper will star in Penn’s latest, but it’s the subject matter that is likely to generate most of the headlines.
The currently untitled film will follow the life of a police officer, rumored to be Michael Fanone, who becomes caught up in the events of January 6. Warner Bros. is onboard.
This is going to go down really well with half the country.
Then again, Warner Bros. film chiefs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca—who could very well lose their jobs if Paramount’s merger with Skydance ultimately reshapes the studio landscape—appear to be in full DGAF mode, greenlighting all sorts of projects at the moment. Penn’s film is reportedly set to shoot in mid-2027, and if David Ellison’s Skydance is firmly in control by then, I wouldn’t be surprised if the project gets scrapped.
The project is being described by Deadline as an “unexpected story about friendship,” but one that functions on multiple levels.
Penn is very political, especially when it comes to Ukraine, and he previously attended a public hearing of the House select committee investigating January 6. At the time, Penn said he was there as “just another citizen” to observe whether “justice would be served.” He sat alongside several law enforcement officers, including Fanone, the former Metropolitan Police Department officer who was injured while responding to the attack on the Capitol.
Fanone served with the Metropolitan Police Department from 2001 until his retirement in 2021. He was originally a Trump supporter and worked as a police officer in Washington, D.C., during the years following 9/11. He wrote a book called “Hold The Line,” in which he detailed multiple unlikely friendships, including one with a Black transgender sex worker named Leslie, whom he brought in to meet younger officers so they could better understand the “diverse communities they swore to protect.”
As for Penn, I haven’t given up on his directing chops, and that’s despite his last two films, “The Last Face” and “Flag Day,” both of which were ridiculed at Cannes and failed to live up to the standard of his earlier work. The decline in quality has been noticeable.
Will this be the film that sees Penn deliver the kind of quality that was present in “The Crossing Guard,” “Into the Wild,” and especially “The Pledge,” which featured one of the last great performances from Jack Nicholson?
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.