Oscar winner Sean Penn skips award ceremony to visit Kyiv

KYIV – American actor Sean Penn, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor for One Battle After Another on March 15, was in Ukraine on March 16, where he met President Volodymyr Zelensky in a show of support for the war-torn country.

An AFP reporter saw the Mystic River (2003) star getting out of a black car in central Kyiv earlier on March 16, wearing sunglasses and carrying a box of cigarettes.

Penn – a vocal advocate for Ukraine who has visited the country several times – won his third acting Oscar on March 15, but was not at the ceremony.

“We can say that he’s in Ukraine, but it’s his personal visit. That’s how he sees it, that he needs to be in Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian official told AFP, adding: “He just wants to support Ukraine.”

Penn – who co-directed a 2023 documentary about Mr Zelensky titled Superpower – met the Ukrainian President on March 16.

“Sean, thanks to you, we know what a true friend of Ukraine is,” Mr Zelensky said on social media, posting a picture of them in the President’s office.

“You have stood with Ukraine since the first day of the full-scale war. This is still true today,” he added.

In an interview with AFP in February, Mr Zelensky listed One Battle After Another (2025), starring Penn, among his most recently watched movies and said he liked it.

A second source told AFP that the actor was also planning to go to the front in eastern Ukraine.

The film Penn co-directed, an admiring portrait of Mr Zelensky about his rise from comedian to war leader when Russia invaded in 2022, premiered at the Berlin film festival in 2023.

In 2025, Penn and rock star Bono made an impassioned plea at the Cannes film festival for the West to stand by Ukraine, posing for pictures on the red carpet with Ukrainian soldiers. AFP