Actor and activist Sean Penn has been getting excruciatingly bad reviews for his novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, a dystopian thriller about a hitman, featuring a Trumpian President. The NY Times described it as “a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy.” And the Guardian said – ‘repellent on one level, but stupid on so many others. Penn doesn’t just swing and miss with his ambitious vocabulary; he swings and cracks a hole in reality as we know it.’
Penn has had an award-winning career, though nothing too recent and his present film, Mel Gibson’s The Professor and the Madman is mired in legal trouble and may never see the light of day. In it he plays a doctor who contributed over 10,000 entries to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857, when he was a convict at an asylum for the criminally insane. Maybe explains the word salad in his novel.
Born 17 August 1960 3.17 pm Burbank, California, he does have a strongly communicative 9th house with his Leo Sun conjunct revolutionary Uranus there, as well as opinionated Pluto conjunct Venus in Virgo. His Mercury in Leo hovers on the cusp from the 8th in a muddled square to Neptune, sextile Mars in outspoken Gemini and an awkward inconjunct to Saturn. His Cancer Moon is trine Neptune and opposition Saturn; with Saturn trine his Venus Pluto – so a mixed emotional life, married at one point to Madonna, and an on/off several times match with Robin Wright.
He’s not in at his most successful with tr Saturn moving below his Ascendant through his 1st quadrant for some years to come. His Solar Arc Mars is square his Neptune at the moment, indicative of plans not working out and usually an ego-dent. And he’s heading for his Second Saturn Return early in 2019 which is usually a sobering reality-check about what comes next. He’ll recover some of his old mojo in 2019/2020. But it’ll be a while before he gets back to his old form.