Sean Penn smokes cigarettes on "Late Show," says he’s on Ambien
Sean Penn made his mark on the "Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on Monday night, complete with the lingering smell of cigarettes. The somewhat rehabilitated bad boy of Hollywood smoked cigarettes during his interview on the show as he promoted his new book, a novel called "Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff."
Penn also told host Stephen Colbert that he had taken an Ambien "to get to sleep after a red-eye flight" as he lit a cigarette.
"I've interviewed you before. How do you tell Sean Penn on Ambien from Sean Penn not on Ambien?" Colbert asked. "Because you lay back in interviews in a really big way."
"I think it's pretty much the same," Penn responded. "There's a lot of times I'm just regular tired."
Penn likened his new novel to "the conversation once a year with the drunken uncle."
As he smoked several cigarettes on stage, Colbert asked him to quit for his health, and Penn quipped, "This is job security for oncologists."
Penn recently revealed on "CBS This Morning" that he plans to step away from acting, and when Colbert probed him on it, Penn admitted that he does not "play well with others."
"The greatest thing that an actor can bring to the party is to play well with others – it's the collaboration," Penn said. "And I increasingly don't play well with others and so it becomes less enjoyable. I love that process when I love it, but I'm not loving that anymore. And that's really why I finally came out to writing a novel."
"Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff" is about a septic tank salesman who becomes a mallet-wielding assassin.