The 'Milk' actor has 'absolutely no apologies' for the green card joke he made when announcing Alejandro Inarritu's 'Birdman' as Best Picture at the Academy Awards last month.
- Mar 8, 2015
AceShowbiz - Sean Penn addresses his green card joke that caused a lot of buzzes at the Oscars, saying that he has no regret for cracking the joke despite the controversies that followed. "I have absolutely no apologies," he says when asked about the matter during a promo tour of his new movie "The Gunman" in Beverly Hills over the weekend.
"I'm always surprised by flagrant stupidity. I keep having more hope," he explains. "The fact is that I understand it. I see it all the time. When somebody sees the opportunity to frame something in the comfort that it will be common_that they can do that and they can get a group to look at them and that they will take on those positions and never really think about what it was."
"In fact, I have a big (expletive) you for every...anybody who is so stupid not to have gotten the irony when you've got a country that is so xenophobic," he adds. "If they had their way, you wouldn't have great filmmakers like Alejandro working in this country. Thank god we do."
"There's a little inside humor with he and I where I know, and wanted to know, that he would be the first person in that room to know that his film won," he says.
Sean Penn made the joke when presenting Best Picture at the Academy Awards last month. "Who gave this son of a b*tch his green card?" he deadpanned before announcing "Birdman" which is directed by Mexican-born director Alejandro Inarritu as the winner.
While there were many debates regarding the joke, Inarritu himself just laughed it off. "I found it hilarious," he said after the ceremony. "Sean and I have that kind of brutal (relationship) where only true friendship can survive." He added, "I make on him a lot of very tough jokes that I will not tell you." The two once worked together in 2003's "21 Grams".
