Sean Penn grew up amid great privilege, said Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone, but he ran with a violent crowd. The 48-year-old actor—whose father was the director Leo Penn—spent his teen years on the beach in Malibu, Calif., with a rough bunch of surfers. A startling number of them came to bad ends. “It was a combination of Huck Finn and Rumble Fish,” he says. “There was a culture of what I’d call soft violence, in the sense that we didn’t let outside surfers surf our beach. We beat people up. This group of surfers, in some kind of Lord of the Flies way, found reasons to put their lives into situations that were horrifying.”
Many of them, Penn says, landed in jail—if they were lucky. “One intentionally ran over somebody with his car. There was one guy we surfed Zuma Beach with. We took a bunch of Quaaludes before we went out and he just drifted off into the ocean, and nobody ever found him. Another guy I surfed and played Little League with, he was dealing and doing blow and shot himself off the edge of a cliff in a car. Another guy killed his mother.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Today's political cartoons - December 22, 2024Cartoons Sunday's cartoons - the long and short of it, trigger finger, and more
-
5 hilariously spirited cartoons about the spirit of ChristmasCartoons Artists take on excuses, pardons, and more
-
Inside the house of AssadThe Explainer Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, ruled Syria for more than half a century but how did one family achieve and maintain power?
