“While watching the maddening news, it felt like there was someone with a machine gun, gunning down communities…,” Actor-director Sean Penn said about the COVID-19 crisis during the Donald Trump administration at the Cannes film festival where he is presenting his new film ‘Flag Day.’ 

Sean Penn, who mobilised a huge network to help Americans during the COVID crisis, was talking about the pandemic response in the US and made it clear that he does not miss the Trump administration. 

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Talking about Donald Trump, Sean Penn said, “When my team and I would come home from test and vaccination sites at night… watching the maddening news, it really felt like there was someone with a machine gun, gunning down communities that were the most vulnerable from a turret at the White House,” AFP quoted. 

The multiple-time Oscar winner actor said, “We were, not only as a country but as a world, let down and ultimately neglected, misinformed, had truth and reason assaulted, under what was in all terms, an obscene administration, humanly and politically.”

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‘Flag Day’ director had used his non-profit group to set up the US’s biggest COVID testing site in Los Angeles in the early months of the pandemic in the nation and his group had also set up vaccination sites in LA and Chicago, where food is also distributed to affected communities. 

In his film ‘Flag Day’, which is competing with 24 other films at Cannes for the top Palme d’Or prize, the director has played the role of a deadbeat father who constantly keeps disappointing his daughter, whose role is played by his real-life offspring, Dylan Penn. 

“The last effort I made to not play it was when I sent the script… to Matt Damon who was generous enough to give it a quick read and call me, not to say that he can do it, not to say he can’t do it, but to say that I was a stupid schmuck not to do it and take this opportunity to act with my daughter,” Penn told reporters at Cannes.