This year, Julia Roberts and Sean Penn both deliver star turns as complicated, volatile characters amid volatile political environments. In Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a Yale professor of philosophy who is forced to confront her own flaws and biases when a student accuses her colleague of assault. And in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw plunges the lives of a father and daughter into chaos as he undertakes a mission of revenge against political dissidents. The actors, longtime friends and neighbors, debrief about their work and careers before heading to dinner, where the conversation surely continues.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
Julia Roberts: How many years do you think we’ve known each other? I think I know the answer.
Sean Penn: I’m thinking back to New York — the Mayflower Hotel during the shooting of “The Pope of Greenwich Village.”
Roberts: So this is over 40 years.
Penn: You were Eric’s little sister.
Roberts: Yes. I still am.
Penn: I’d heard about you. But you must’ve been a teenager.
Roberts: Sixteen, I think.
Penn: So it’s been a while.
Roberts: Here we are.
Penn: Neighbors, buds.
Roberts: All right. We do have to check a few boxes, and I am legitimately curious to know a few things about “One Battle After Another.”
Penn: OK, let’s get that stuff over with.
Roberts: Let’s not get it over with! Let’s get it started! I have never met Paul Thomas Anderson. How did you meet him? This is your second movie with him.
Penn: It’s funny because my brother Michael scored his first two movies. So I knew he was working on this movie “Hard Eight.” I had just directed a movie, and Michael thought I might have some advice for Paul. I don’t think I offered advice except a go-to quote I had at the time, which was “Always consider the possibility that everyone else is wrong.”
I’ve known him since then — he was working on “There Will Be Blood” and I was on “Into the Wild,” both at Skywalker Ranch. So we started spending time up there together and became friends, and talked about working together a time or two. This last couple of them jelled.
Roberts: What kind of environment does he create for actors on a set? Is it happy and jovial, or is it quiet?
Penn: There’s nothing at all performative about him as a director. There’s no letting everyone know who’s the director, or the boss, or any of that. In fact, he doesn’t want that from anybody. There’s no big trailers. Leo and I shared a double banger. And there’s nobody to say, “Hey, could you grab me a coffee?” You get your own coffee. Everything was focused on the movie.
Roberts: Does he do a lot of takes?
Penn: Sometimes we did. He’s constantly exploring, and he has a great confidence in his writing. At the same time, when there would be a change, it would be him thinking, “We don’t need this.” He was throwing away gems every day.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
Roberts: Wow. Knowing you — and, more interestingly, my children knowing you — so well, and seeing this movie and being so knocked out … Where did you start building the character?
Penn: My experience of it was all in the script. I didn’t struggle on this one at all. It was so clear to me. I had such a great experience reading that script that I didn’t want to get in the audience’s way.
Roberts: You’ve been a director for a long time now. When you’re acting in something that you’re not directing, is it hard to put director thoughts away?
Penn: Not when you’re with a real director. I never questioned where the camera was. I knew I was in great hands the whole time.
Let’s transition to “After the Hunt.” I have a lot of thoughts about this movie. I love the subject. I struggle to watch it because I get angry, and I have positions on different characters. I’ve been admiring [Luca Guadagnino’s] other films — what was the experience like?
Roberts: I, too, have admired him, and I am so intrigued by all his movies, and they’re all so different. You just kind of think: Who is this guy? When this movie came to me and I was reading it and pondering things, and I get the call: Maybe Luca Guadagnino is interested in this. And every cell inside of me perked up, because I thought, I want to know. That’s a movie I am interested in seeing, his interpretation of this.
I can speak for my castmates: We had such a joyful experience. I remember Luca saying to me one day, “This is the first time I’ve ever been happy on a set.” I said, “I find that impossible to believe,” because he’s so joyful. He has so much happiness. And my experience with him was complete. I’ve probably talked to him every week since this movie finished. I can’t say that about any director — and I am friends with directors that I’ve worked with more than once. The only person I ever had a really continuous conversation with was Mike Nichols.
Penn: It’s interesting — the subject being what it is, there had to have been philosophical debates, generational and gender differences. And yet that played out with a joyous set.
Roberts: Luca and Andrew [Garfield] and Ayo [Edebiri] and Chloë [Sevigny] came to our house and sat for days and days at our kitchen table, and we had all these conversations. Really bright people do not jockey for their position. They share their ideas and their feelings and then they listen intently. It’s the listening that I feel we’ve gotten the farthest from in culture, because conversations get so intense so quickly, and you’re just waiting for that break so that you can say, “OK, but this is why I’m right. This is why what I believe is better.”
It was so nice to have the time and to be with truly bright people, and hearing what everybody had to say. We didn’t necessarily tell all our characters’ secrets. But it was just a great playground of thought.
Penn: “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable” — I just wanted to go, “Thank God somebody’s saying this.” We’re in this time of a lot of talk therapy, a lot of what I’d call the trauma industry. I think shame is underrated these days. It’s got a bad name this decade. Why shouldn’t people be ashamed of things? Hold on to it for a while and reenter with some more humility.
Roberts: Real humility.
Penn: It is a provocative movie, and I know that it got some provocative reactions. I thought it was so refreshing, especially for this auteur filmmaker. When you met him, did you suggest that you would be interested in working together at some point?
Roberts: So when we first had a conversation about doing “After the Hunt” together, we were both going to be in Los Angeles. We were trying to see each other, and it wasn’t working out. As fate would have it, we ended up at the same party. When I got off work, Danny [Moder] and I went to a party, and he came to the same party, and we hugged and sat down and spent the next hour and a half talking with our faces practically pressed together, with this bustling party going on around us. It’s the fastest I have ever boarded a train that left the station without a destination.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
Penn: With Paul’s movie, by the time he sent me the script he already had Leo [DiCaprio] on board. Leo, I’d wanted to work with him — I’d known him since he was 15, and we’d almost done several movies together over the years. I think I was on page 15, and I just called him and said …
Roberts: “Let’s go.”
Penn: “Wherever this goes, I’m in.” It was killing me.
Roberts: Isn’t it nice to feel that way? It’s so rare. I would imagine every script has your fingerprints on it.
Penn: The scripts that do have my fingerprints, I either [wrote] them, or you won’t find fingerprints after page 10.
Roberts: Really?
Penn: If I sense artifice or it hits a pet peeve — which happens more often than not — then I don’t keep reading.
Roberts: I have to finish.
Penn: Well, you’re more diligent than I am.
Roberts: I’m not. I just think something might happen. You don’t have to say — of course you wouldn’t say — but has there ever been a movie you passed on that then you saw it and thought, “Maybe I made a mistake”?
Penn: I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted, no. I would have to have had the experience of making it and having it be miserable before I could regret it that way.
Roberts: I love the way your brain works. I just love your train of thought.
Penn: I have regretted doing movies, but I’ve never regretted not doing them. And, with any luck, I’m better at those selections now than in the past.
Roberts: Do you have any idea how many movies you’ve been in?
Penn: Do you?
Roberts: I could ballpark it, because someone told me not that long ago, and I was so surprised. Based on when that was, I could probably ballpark it at a very surprising number.
Penn: What would that number be?
Roberts: Fifty-five, maybe.
Penn: If we include where we did a small thing in something, everything, all-in, I think it’s about 100.
Roberts: It’s a lot of fucking movies.
Penn: Too many.
Roberts: Not enough for me. It’s impressive. You’re impressive. You just have to take it — you have to accept this right now. You are impressive.
Penn: I might be the last of a generation that doesn’t go to bed at 10 or put skin cream on before bed. And I know that’s a dermatology problem for some. But impressive is when somebody can handle their own poetic inspirations, as you do your gifts. [You have] the capacity not only as an actress, but in terms of sharing joy. There were two years when your calls saying, “What time should the cake be ready?” were the only things that reminded me it was my mother’s birthday. Raising these kids that are so extraordinarily well rounded, in a job that traditionally relies on people living in their own head — congratulations on that.
Roberts: Well, let me just congratulate you on taking the conversation from being about you …
Penn: … and going right back to a social experiment with people complimenting each other for money. We’re not getting paid. Are we getting paid?
Roberts: I’m not getting paid.
Penn: I think you’re phenomenal. My mom always used to light up when you would come around, and then you’ve got this great husband who’s my favorite cinematographer.
Roberts: Mine too. I go, “Where do I share the most understanding? Where do I feel the most seen and understood and felt by Sean Penn?” It’s my love of Danny Moder.
Penn: I remember him telling me you were doing a movie and Danny was handholding a camera. He’s focused on his work and getting in a corner, followed by the description: “That was the sexiest thing on earth.” And I thought, “OK …”
Roberts: Back to when you met Paul! Oh my God, I’m all flummoxed now. I do have some questions for you, but now I’m afraid to ask them. Who is the first big-time-actor type that you met that just knocked your socks off?
Penn: When I was in high school, the actor Anthony Zerbe came and did a career-day talk. I knew of him. He was an acclaimed figure in my household. My parents were fans of his work. He did movies, but he also did a lot of television in the ’70s. I knew his face very well; I knew my father had worked with him. I’d never thought about being an actor until my senior year of high school — and really only as a way into directing movies. I wanted to do that, but I saw acting as a way to stow away on the plane to get in there.
Roberts: Do you remember the first movie that you saw that you just thought, “Yep …”
Penn: It was probably “Lenny.” I knew it was the same director that had done “Cabaret” — Bob Fosse — and I got a real sense of what separates people like that.
Roberts: How somebody could tell such complete stories? Wow. What a person to land on.
Penn: But that predates me identifying that I wanted to work in film. So then probably it was “Badlands,” in terms of when I said, “I want to direct movies.”
Roberts: And then you worked with Terrence Malick.
Penn: It’s why I asked you about Luca. Because I’ve done that a couple of times over the years, where I’ve met a director that I admired a lot and said, “Give me a dollar and tell me where I’ve got to go.” And that was Terry Malick and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Oh, and Paolo Sorrentino. Three times.
Roberts: I met Terrence Malick once, and I was so in awe and smitten, and we had the sweetest conversation. He seemed like somebody that you might have walked into a diner and sat down at a counter, and that was the man sitting next to you, and you had a conversation while he drank black coffee and you ate a cheeseburger. He’s so unassuming.
Penn: I’ve made two movies with him. He’s such a kind person, and there’s genius in him, and a very strong, increasingly spiritual pursuit, which I didn’t always know how to track as it related to storytelling. What about [Steven] Soderbergh?
Roberts: Steven Soderbergh. The way that he directs perfectly aligns with the way that I act. It’s really intentional, and there’s a momentum that is really meaningful to him. Once he has what he wants, then we go do something else. He has it all in his head to start with. Once he sees it, he goes, “That’s great. That’s what I wanted. I’m ready to go.”
I’ve made four movies with Steven. I just think he’s the greatest. The last movie he hired me for [“2002’s Full Frontal”], he said, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this script. I’m going to send it to you.” And I go, “I’m in.” He goes, “No, I want you to read it first.” I go, “I’ll read it, but I know I’m going to do it.” And it was the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever read, but there I was, loving every minute of it.”
Penn: We need more of those directors. Let’s go get ’em.
Roberts: Goodbye, Sean. You’re the all time!
Penn: Goodbye, Julia. I’ll see you at dinner in 10 minutes.
This is a conversation from Variety and CNN’s Actors on Actors. To watch the full video, go to CNN’s streaming platform now. Or check out Variety’s YouTube page at 3 p.m. ET today.