Sean Penn says #MeToo movement divides men and women and is 'too black and white'

Sean Penn lived up to his bad boy image by declaring Monday that the #MeToo movement serves to “divide men and women.”

He also added that the anti-sexual harassment effort is “too black and white” while appearing on NBC’s “Today” alongside actress Natascha McElhone, his co-star in Hulu’s new series “The First.”

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“Salacious is as soon as you call something a movement that is really a series of many individual accusers, victims, accusations, some of which are unfounded,” Penn, 58, said on the morning show. “The spirit of much of what has been the #MeToo movement is to divide men and women.”

Penn spoke on the topic after “Today” show anchor Natalie Morales asked the actors if their new show’s prominent female characters were inspired by MeToo. The 2030s-set series about the first trip to Mars features a female president (Jeannie Berlin) and CEO (McElhone), and three out of the five Mars-bound astronauts are women.

“I’d like to think that none of it was influenced by what they would call the movement of MeToo,” he responded. “I think it’s influenced by the things that are developing in terms of the empowerment of women acknowledging each other and being acknowledged by men. This is a movement that was largely shouldered by a recepticle of the salacious.”

Morales asked him to elaborate.

“Well, we don’t know what’s a fact in many of the cases,” he explained.

When Morales suggested that the movement has united women, Penn said he’s spoken to women from “all walks of life” when the cameras are off and “there is a common sense that is not represented at all in the discussion” when the cameras are on.

“The discussion where if Sean Penn says this, so and so is going to attack him for saying this because of that,” he added. “I don’t want it to be a trend and I’m very suspicious of a movement that gets glommed onto in great stridency and rage without nuance. And even when people try to discuss it in a nuanced way, the nuance itself is attacked.”

He also said he thinks the movement is “too black and white” and that, “In most things that are very important, it’s really good to just slow down.”

McElhone defended her co-star, saying that, “What Sean I think is alluding to is this bubble of actors or people who are in magazines that have gotten a lot of attention from this. Of course it’s terrific that they’ve put a spotlight on it, but now we need to go into the places where this is happening behind closed doors and it’s not exposed and those voices aren’t being heard.”

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Penn was trashed on Twitter following the remarks, with many users bringing up rumors that he once allegedly attacked then-wife Madonna with a baseball bat in the 1980s, charges that the Queen of Pop dismissed years later as “completely outrageous, malicious, reckless and false.”

The #MeToo movement heated up in the fall of last year to bring attention to sex assault and harassment in the workplace after allegations surfaced against producer Harvey Weinstein, which kicked off a spurt of other accusations against powerful Hollywood players.