Interview

COPPOLA: You said you were doing some sort of independent study. Usually one parent is leading that. Was it your mother, your father, or both of them?

PENN: My mom. My parents had divorced.

COPPOLA: So you were living with your mother?

PENN: Yeah, and my brother, in California.

COPPOLA: Did your mother have artistic interests or aspirations that you kind of picked up a little?

PENN: Not as far as dance or theater, but she is definitely a creative animal—a bold Texas lady. It’s funny that my brother and I are both in the arts. He was a dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, with [Mikhail] Baryshnikov.

COPPOLA: As you approached junior high and high school, did you have any other interests? Or were you pretty much focused on this vision of acting as soulful and personal and mysterious?

PENN: No. I think that after Linda Lovelace, acting was not even a consideration. At the time, I was just interested in dancing. I’d get out at lunch, and, when everybody else would go back for their fifth and sixth periods, I would get on the bus and go to my dance class for eight hours.

COPPOLA: So you were pretty far along . . .

PENN: I was very much along, until we moved to San Diego for my senior year of high school. Then, it was like that life was over.

COPPOLA: Were you popular in high school?

PENN: I was very much a loner. I had two girlfriends. I had more male friends—I’ve always been more comfortable with guys. I don’t get that chick-vibe thing. And yet, I was chosen for homecoming queen.

COPPOLA: Really?

PENN: But I was not popular at all. I actually thought it was going to be like the scene in Carrie [1976], with the pig’s blood. [laughs] That’s what it felt like—like I was being set up.

COPPOLA: What was your feeling about your beauty at the time?

PENN: Well, I think that the whole idea of beauty distorts your ability to not only find yourself, but to have a healthy sense of your identity. I mean, in high school, it was all based on some approval of whether or not you were pretty enough to do—dot, dot, dot. There was always somebody prettier, somebody with better tits, somebody with longer legs. I got into modeling after that . . .

COPPOLA: You did?

PENN: Yeah, I was pushed into that by . . . You know, you’d get discovered at a roller-skating rink, and someone says, “Ooh, I can make you a book.” And then I went to Europe and I didn’t want to come home. I loved Europe so much.

COPPOLA: What cities did you go to on that tour?

PENN: Paris, Rome, Milan . . .

COPPOLA: So, the modeling centers.

PENN: Yeah, I mean, I was traveling and I landed in Paris after doing the full backpack-youth-hostel summer. And then I didn’t want to leave, and I had to work, so I signed with the agency Paris Planning and moved into a house with five other models. I worked a lot, but no runway stuff—just print. I lived there for a year, and then in Milan.

COPPOLA: Did you learn French?

PENN: I speak French—poorly, but I speak it.