‘Superpower’ Director Sean Penn Blasts Putin: “A Gangster With Nuclear Weapons”
deadline.comSuperpower director Sean Penn isn’t mincing words in his denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two-time Oscar-winning actor, whose new documentary about the war in Ukraine is now streaming on Paramount+, calls the Kremlin leader “a gangster with nuclear weapons,” in an interview with Deadline.
His comments came during a taping at Deadline studios in Los Angeles for an upcoming episode of Doc Talk, a new podcast that launched earlier this month.
At another point in the interview, Penn described Putin as “this monster that’s running the show” in Russia now. In contrast, he lauds Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s character responding to the existential threat to his country from Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “The pursuit of patriotism, it is the courage of moral clarity where there’s chaos, it is what Zelenskyy brings to the party,” he insisted. “It is what we saw when he spoke at the UN [Tuesday].” Penn added, in reference to Zelenskyy’s address, “When one watches that — we all have pretty good lie detectors, whether we’re on the right or left — if we really just take a breath, there’s nothing not genuine about this guy’s speech.
And in English, his third language… It’s the highest functioning human leadership and courage that we could all aspire to having, and certainly to maintain committed support of.” For his documentary Superpower, which Penn co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, he traveled seven times to Ukraine.
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