Over a year after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, the notoriously hot-tempered Sean Penn is questioning why he was jailed for a similar incident.
“I don’t know Will Smith. I met him once,” Penn, 63, told Variety in a new interview. He seemed very nice when I met him. He was so f – – king good in ‘King Richard.'”
The “Dead Man Walking” star continued, “So why the f – – k did you just spit on yourself and everybody else with this stupid f – – king thing? Why did I go to f – – king jail for what you just did? And you’re still sitting there? Why are you guys standing and applauding his worst moment as a person?”
Penn is seemingly referring to being sentenced to 60 days in county jail in 1987 after punching and spitting on an extra on the set of “Colors.”
He was 26 at the time and served only 33 days of his sentence. Penn was already on probation at the time for a misdemeanor battery charge for allegedly assaulting his then-partner, Madonna’s, songwriter friend, David Wolinski, at a nightclub in April 1986.
Penn has also attacked two journalists who were trying to take photos of the couple in Nashville in 1985.
He attacked another photog in October 2009, which resulted in him being sentenced to three years of probation and 300 hours of community service in 2010.
The Post has contacted reps for Penn and Smith for comment.
Penn, who was promoting his new Paramount+ documentary “Superpower” about Ukraine’s underdog fight to maintain its freedom from Russia, couldn’t help but compare the Smith slap with the power struggle happening overseas.
“This f – – king bullshit wouldn’t have happened with Zelenskyy,” Penn said of Ukraine’s sixth president. “Will Smith would never have left that chair to be part of stupid violence. It never would have happened. I thought, well, f – – k, you know? I’ll give them to Ukraine. They can be melted down to bullets they can shoot at the Russians.”
Back at the 2022 Oscars, Smith was still allowed to go onstage and accept his first-ever Oscar after slapping Rock across the face.
The “Men in Black” star was even gettin’ jiggy with it at an afterparty.
Rock reportedly did not want to press charges on the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
But Smith would later face consequences as the academy’s board of governors decided to ban him from the prestigious award show for 10 years.
Smith has repeatedly publicly apologized to Rock for his actions.
“I’m human and I made a mistake and I’m trying not to think of myself as a piece of s – – t,” Smith said in a video posted to YouTube in July 2022, claiming that Rock was “not ready to talk” one-on-one.
In November, he told Trevor Noah that he was “going through something” and lost his cool that night.
“That was a horrific night as you can imagine,” Smith said. “There’s many nuances and complexities to it, you know, but at the end of the day, I just — I lost it and I guess what I would say [is] you just never know what somebody’s going through.”
None of it justified his actions, Smith said.
“It was a lot of things. It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother. It’s, you know, all of that just bubbled up in in that moment,” he said. “That’s not who I want to be.”
