Sean Penn: The Rolling Stone Interview

One afternoon in January, Sean Penn answers the door of his Bay Area home, shoeless, in jeans and a gray thermal undershirt, his hair sort of crazily mussed, looking as if he's just woken up. It's a couple of minutes past noon.

To say that Penn has "aged well" is to employ a nonstandard usage of the term. He does not look younger than his 48 years. His forehead is baroquely creased, his long face haggard, his hair soaring and gray-streaked and parted down the middle. Something Penn is wearing, or Penn himself, exudes a beer-and-cigarettes musk particular to the morning after a rough night. All of which sounds like the opposite of a compliment, and for many it would be — but Penn has aged into exactly the type of guy he's always seemed to want to be. When he was younger, not yet anointed the greatest actor of his generation, Penn had a habit of befriending older men he'd long idolized (Jack Nicholson, Charles Bukowski, Dennis Hopper, Hunter S. Thompson) who had, aside from their obvious talents, seemed to figure out a way of living (a way of living very hard) that also became an integral extension of their art. Like the brilliant character actor that he is, Penn studied these men and lived hard himself — fistfights, benders, jail, Madonna, public references to a sitting president's "soiled and blood-stained underwear." "I'm not an alcoholic," he told The New York Times Magazine in 1998. "I'm just a big drinker, and there's a difference." You get the sense that Penn would welcome, somewhere down the road, a Bukowski-esque level of physical decay.

Inside the house, Penn's daughter, Dylan, 17, and a friend are preparing food in the kitchen, where a holiday card from the Coppolas (Francis Ford and wife pictured on the front) hangs on the wall. A massive stone fireplace dominates the living room. (If there is not such a thing as a walk-in fireplace, the term should be invented for this one.) Son Hopper, 15, is nowhere to be seen. In another room, there's a framed poster of a film noir called Fall Guy, which starred Penn's father, Leo, an actor and director who was blacklisted in the Forties and Fifties. (To bypass the blacklist, Leo Penn was billed in Fall Guy as "Clifford Penn.")