Actor Sean Penn writes the U.S. is “a nation in need of an assassin” in a revamped hard copy edition of his 2016 audiobook, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, released Tuesday.
The satire novel features the character Bob Honey, a septic-tank-salesman-turned-government-contracted-assassin in a dystopian America led by a President Trump-like commander in chief.
“You are not simply a president in need of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin,” a disillusioned Honey writes in a letter to fictional president, Mr. Landlord.
In the book, Penn describes Landlord as a “violently immature seventy-year-old boy-man with money and French vanilla cotton candy hair.”
But in an interview with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s “The Late Show,” Penn addressed speculation he harbored similar thoughts in real life.
“Have the Secret Service contacted you?” Colbert asked Penn on Monday. “That’s the sort of thing you can’t even make jokes about. That’s the sort of thing they take very seriously.”
“This is a fiction, about fictional people. It is, on other hand, also a kind of venting,” Penn replied.
Penn, a two-time Academy Award winning actor, is best known for his work in films like “Mystic River” and “Milk,” as well as for his turbulent marriage to pop icon Madonna.
Despite initially supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic primary, Penn later redirected allegiance to eventual presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Penn’s book was published by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
