Actor Tim Robbins has blasted his fellow leftists for demonizing COVID vaccine and lockdown skeptics, saying he was wrong to have “bought into” the establishment narrative surrounding masking and other measures.
Meanwhile, his Mystic River co-star Sean Penn expressed the opposite view in an interview from last year that recently went viral again, saying he believes anti-mRNA vaccine rhetoric is “criminal,” and anyone who is unvaccinated for this particular illness should not only stay at home but also be deprived of their livelihood.
The two Hollywood stars acted together in Clint Eastwood’s 2003 Mystic River, for which they both won Oscars. They also worked together on the 1995 death-row movie Dead Man Walking, which Robbins directed.
Robbins spoke about COVID during an interview Sunday on Russell Brand’s podcast. During the conversation, he said he unquestioningly complied with COVID measures in Los Angeles during the early days of the pandemic.
“I bought into it… I was masking everywhere. I was keeping my social distance. I was adhering to the requests made of me, and I felt angry at people that didn’t do that,” Robbins told Brand.
He said the left ended up demonizing people on the right who didn’t comply with government edicts.
“We turned into tribal, angry, vengeful people,” he said. “And I don’t think that is something that is sustainable for the Earth, that we start demonizing people who don’t agree with our particular health policies and turn them into monsters, turn them into pariahs, say they don’t deserve a hospital bed.”
“It turned into ‘you should fucking die’ because you have not complied,” he added. “That’s incredibly dangerous.”
Robbins said his views began changing after visiting the U.K. in early 2021.
In Britain, he “noticed a lot of people were not adhering, again, to these requests made by their government. I thought, well, they’re going to have a hard day coming up, that there will be some serious death here.”
“When I saw that there wasn’t a huge death rate here [in Britain], after I witnessed personally what was happening, I started to wonder more and more about what we were being told and whether it was true or not.”
His mind changed even more after observing an anti-lockdown protest in New York.
“I saw the way they were being described in the press and it wasn’t true. These were not National Front Nazis. These were liberals and lefties and people who believed in personal freedom. I began to educate myself and open my mind to what was going on.”
Meanwhile, Sean Penn spoke out against vaccine skeptics in an interview with Extra last year.
When asked how he felt about “anti-vaccine rhetoric,” Penn replied: “It’s a cowardice of conviction. I think that it is an unwillingness to engage in a culture of common sense. That at this point, it seems criminal to me, actually.”
“I really feel that if someone chooses not to be vaccinated, that they should choose to stay home. Not go to work. Not have a job,” he added. “As long as we’re all paying for these streets, we gotta ride safely on them. And so I’m just hopeful that the mindset will change.”
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