Sean Penn’s son Hopper says ultimatum from father saved him from crystal meth addiction
Sean Penn's son has spoken about how his film star father saved him from crystal meth addiction.
Actor and model Hopper Penn, 23, whose mother is House Of Cards star Robin Wright, told ES Magazine he fell in with a “bad crowd” after his parents divorced in 2010 following a tempestuous 13-year marriage.
The Hollywood couple brought up Hopper and his sister Dylan, now 25, in a small town near San Francisco. But when Hopper was 14, Wright and Penn split.
Former hellraiser Penn moved to Los Angeles and Hopper began dividing his time between his parents’ homes. At 16, he moved to Los Angeles full-time, as did his mother.
At the time of the split, he was “pretty mad because they had split up before and then got back together, and then they did it again”. He added: “I was young and thinking: ‘Are you just f****** with me and my sister?’ I mean, it was not the best. It was tough, talking to them. Because they were both pretty broken too, I think.”
A month after moving to Los Angeles he was badly injured in a skateboarding accident and suffered bleeding on the brain which required surgery. Afterwards, he became a full-time tearaway.
He said: “I was doing a lot of stuff but meth was the main one that brought me down. I went to rehab because I woke up in hospital and my dad said, ‘Rehab? Or bus bench?’ I was like, ‘I’ll take the bed’.
“Thank God I got out of that because that was the worst time in my life. Because it’s not fun when it gets to a point where you just need it.”
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Afterwards Penn cast his son in a film he was directing, The Last Face. Hopper said: “I know he kind of wrote the part for me. He really wanted to work with me and it ended up being great. But yeah, maybe it was about giving me just a little structure.”
He has since become the face of Fendi’s latest eyewear collection and starred in film War Machine, with Brad Pitt. But he still maintains his other job: working in a pizza restaurant. “I wouldn’t call myself an actor, really. Or a model,” he said.
“On the acting side, I’ve told myself when I do four movies, then I can consider myself an actor. And then, the modelling side? I don’t know. I guess now, this campaign, this is maybe a tipping point.”
