Actor Sean Penn, left, shakes hands with Mexican drug lord Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman in Mexico, in this undated Rolling Stone photo.HANDOUT
He has stood next to Hugo Chavez, had an audience with one of Saddam Hussein's top ministers and now Sean Penn has made a splash with his exclusive interview with a fugitive Mexican drug lord.
Mr. Penn's activism has long been mocked as a humourless, extreme form of the affectations of Hollywood liberals who think fame has endowed them with wisdom.
But his chip-on-the-shoulder attitude and distrust of officialdom predate his celebrity. His beliefs were shaped by events that took place before his birth.
His father, Leo, a veteran of 31 bombing missions in the Second World War, became an actor, on contract with Paramount. However, by the late 1940s, he was blacklisted because of his sympathies for producers, directors and screenwriters who refused to answer questions about their possible Communist affiliations.
"The country and the media stood by like frightened sheep. In the end, there was no loyalty for a soldier," the younger Mr. Penn wrote in a tribute to his father published three years ago in The Hollywood Reporter.
He wrote that, while he was a teen, he and his father had crossed paths with Elia Kazan, the director who had famously testified and identified Communists working in Hollywood. "It was the first time I ever witnessed my father ignore someone," Mr. Penn wrote.
Within a decade after that incident, Mr. Penn was a Hollywood megastar, making headlines as much for his acting chops as for his tumultuous dealings with paparazzi.
But even as he appeared at red-carpet premieres and won two Oscars, he was supporting various causes, challenging the mainstream narrative.
"We still sit silently while chicken hawks and bottle-blond and unsubtly augmented pundits sing cheap poison in best-selling books, bloated radio and skin-deep TV," he wrote in his tribute to his father.
While Saddam Hussein was still in power, Mr. Penn toured Baghdad and got a meeting with then-deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.
He visited Iran and published a five-part series about his travel in the San Francisco Chronicle. He set up a relief organization following the earthquake in Haiti.
More recently, in 2012, he was in Venezuela and stood next to the late Hugo Chavez as he defended his government's decision to ship diesel fuel to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Penn's interview with Joaquin Guzman has been derided for its uncritical tone and pedestrian prose. When the article was released Saturday night, Mr. Penn declined to comment. He was at a fundraiser for Haiti.
Tu Thanh Ha