Sean Penn: “They said it was attempted murder” | The Louis Theroux Podcast

The trouble that you've got into, specifically, it felt like in the, this is going back, 80s, in the 80s, you know, you had a reputation for punching photographers. That became the sort of the tabloid shorthand for a bit. They were there for the ones that were photographers with cameras, so those were recorded, it wasn't just photographers. There was, I want to dig one up, okay, here we go. This might have, there was a few good profiles of you. The Rolling Stone one was pretty funny, that was from 96. Penn has had his share of run-ins with the police. In Macau in 1986, during the shooting of Shanghai Surprise, he was arrested for helping to deter an intruding paparazzo by hanging him by his ankles from the ninth floor balcony of his hotel room. Penn subsequently broke out of the jail where he was being held on the charges of attempted murder and escaped the country by jet foil. Yeah, did not hang him by his ankles. We were not going to throw him over the balcony, we wanted to stop what was happening. Initially we didn't know it was a camera that he was holding, he jumped out, he was in a corridor. There were two security guys walking, myself and a friend of mine, up into this hotel. We were ahead of them, and there was a door here, and they had presentation, the hotel had two doors to this room they were giving me, a very nice room, but we're walking and there was a door just opposite that, and just as I'm starting to see this open door, somebody jumps out, and they have something. So we did both grab him and we charged him right through the room to the balcony that was also presentationally open. It was very conveniently a beeline, and cutting him off here, bending him over, and by that time I had seen, let's say within the first second and a half, I noticed it was a camera. I was actually telling this other guy, you know, it's just a camera, it's a camera, like we should let him go. But we never had a chance to pull him back before the security guys came and pulled us back. So they said that it was attempted murder, so they put us in literally, you know, Barney Fife's jail. I'm looking around this cell and thinking, okay, wait, is there anybody out there? There were people that knew we were there because I was working on a thing, but that could be ours. Do I get a phone call? Do I get anything? Then we noticed that when they left, they only had one guy, you know, like if you go to a village on a Sunday, anywhere in the world, and there's a little police huddle, you know, there's one guy, right? And this guy was not youthful. And the knob that locks the gate, I could see it actually had grinder facing. At some point, they lost a key or something and they ground through it, meaning it was open. All you had to do is give it a little push. And we knew because it wasn't far to this hotel, it was just one road that had taken us from the jetfoil launch to the hotel in the first place. So even though we were brand, I mean, I just stepped foot in Macau, I didn't know anything, but I knew how to get to the jetfoil. So we just bolted. And then we went to the Kowloons, when we got to Hong Kong, we went to- Did the cop not come after you? Didn't look back. We just bolted and ran straight to the jetfoil and they would leave- What is a jetfoil? It's those float boats that take you back and forth to Hong Kong. It was Shanghai Surprise, we said that. You were in it with Madonna, right? We have to, because that might have been my greatest crime. It's the one they didn't get. The movie itself. But it will damage you if you see it. It got terrible reviews, didn't it? It deserved worse. And then ultimately, it was the gangsters that negotiated the thing. I don't think anybody in government had anything to say about it.