Maria Puente

USA TODAY

Sean Penn stunned Hollywood again, and not for his acting.

Penn, the Oscar-winning movie star, political and humanitarian activist, rebel with many causes, writer and globetrotter, says he took a secret meeting late last year in a Mexican jungle with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the fugitive kingpin of the Sinaloa drug cartel and two-time escapee from Mexican jails.

Penn says this in an 11,000-word article, headlined "El Chapo Speaks," published in Rolling Stone late Saturday, complete with a picture of Penn and Guzmán (known as Shorty in Spanish) shaking hands, and a video of the paunchy-and-short drug lord answering questions about his sprawling drug business.

Penn says their meeting started with a warm hug. When it ended hours later, Penn had a scoop and the possible script for a different movie: Call it Sean and Shorty.

Mexican actress Kate del Castillo hikes profile with the 'El Chapo' affair

It's an episode bound to add to the mystique of Sean Penn-the-iconoclast, says PR expert Howard Bragman, founder of 15 Minutes PR. Perhaps by coincidence, the news broke on the eve of the Golden Globes.

"This is very on-brand for Sean Penn, who's always been controversial," says Bragman. Lucky, he says, that Penn is also reserved, because boasting about this would be a bad idea.

"Now he needs to take a laid-back, low-key approach, let the Golden Globes happen and take the wind out of this story," Bragman says. "There are lots of land mines here, like, Number 1, did you do something nefarious by meeting with this criminal?"

Penn doesn't seem to think so.

"I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting criminals, nor do I have any gloating arrogance at posing for selfies with unknowing security men," Penn writes. "But...this will be the first interview El Chapo had ever granted outside an interrogation room, leaving me no precedent by which to measure the hazards."

Penn says Guzmán agreed to a meeting because he wanted some Hollywood jefe to make a movie about his lucrative life of drug-dealing, which also includes mass murder, torture and power-grabbing in Mexico.

So, with some Hollywood producer-types that Penn only semi-identifies, plus a Mexican soap-opera star, Kate del Castillo, to broker the introduction, he set off late last year on a long, secret trip to an unnamed area of northern Mexico to meet El Chapo and interview him for a possible bio pic while surrounded by platoons of the drug lord's men armed to the teeth and edgy.

"Had we really just been where we were? With whom we'd been?," Penn writes towards the end of his article, once he's back in Los Angeles. "It seemed such a strange dream. Somehow, with all the planning and the travel, I still hadn't believed that we'd actually gotten to El Chapo."

Penn's article landed with a bang because it came just a day after Guzmán, until then the world's most wanted drug lord, was recaptured for the second time in his home state of Sinaloa, next door to Durango state where Mexican officials say the Penn-El Chapo meeting took place.

On Friday, Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez said that Guzmán's interview with Penn helped give law enforcement a lead on tracking and capturing El Chapo, leading authorities to Guzmán in a rural part of Durango in October.

AFP reported Sunday that authorities in Mexico now want to talk to Penn and del Castillo.

Penn, through his publicist Mara Buxbaum, declined Sunday to comment on this. Nor would he comment on the media and legal furor his article caused, and whether he could be in danger — from the Sinaloa cartel or from Mexican or American law enforcement — as a result of his tete à tete with Guzmán.

And Penn said little Saturday night at his Help Haiti Home charity gala in Beverly Hills, where he arrived holding hands with ex-wife Madonna, according to Billboard magazine.

But in his article he said that there were already indications back in October, shortly after the jungle meeting, that law enforcement was getting close to El Chapo's hiding place by tracking a cellphone among his crew.

Authorities later raided the area but Guzmán escaped. Authorities finally caught him Friday at a house in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where Mexican marines grabbed him after a shootout that left five people dead.

Penn has landed in news headlines before. He has publicly intervened to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haiti earthquake and survivors of 2012 floods in Pakistan. He has campaigned for same-sex marriage and defended the late Venezuela president Hugo Chavez, who was known for his anti-American rhetoric.

Did Penn and companions break some law in either the U.S. or Mexico with their escapade? Not clear but CNN media-and-legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday that he did not believe there would be legal consequences for Penn.





So is a movie about El Chapo actually viable? Maybe, says Bragman, but not yet. Hollywood prefers stories that already have an ending, and that's not the case with El Chapo.

"I don’t think this story is over, you're going to have a lot of twists and turns before it's over," Bragman says. "El Chapo could escape again, he could be extradited, he could be executed for murder. Lots of different things could happen. And he's not the most sympathetic character in the world."