Sean Penn in The Slab Boys

Posted by Tom Brogan on Thursday, February 26, 2015

I'm away to see The Slab Boys at the Citizens Theatre tonight, so here's an article in Rolling Stone from 1983 on Sean Penn. The then 22 year old had just finished a Broadway run of the Paisley set play.

"I think a movie, like Raiders of the Lost Ark is just like taking drugs," snarls the man who claims he has never touched recreational chemicals. "I'm against the whole idea of 'Oh, it's good entertainment.' “My dream," he says, is to play Phil Ochs. I have a recording of him speaking in his most depressed times. He went to South Africa and his throat was damaged and he started drinking a lot and getting very paranoid. He did an interview where he talked about death and how afraid he was of death. What he didn't talk about was how certain he was that he was dying. "He was sure he had this stomach problem that couldn't be fixed.... He sat his daughter, Meegan, down ‑ she was eleven years old ‑and he said, 'I just want you to understand that I'm dying.' It was incredible. When the Sixties basically failed so did Phil Ochs."

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