Why Wasn’t Sean Penn at the Oscars 2026 & How He Achieved a Very Rare Feat With His Win

Sean Penn won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars 2026, but was a no-show at the ceremony itself. Presenter Kieran Culkin collected the prize on Penn’s behalf, after the actor won for his role as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

The category was among the most stacked of the night, with Penn facing competition from his co-star Benicio del Toro, as well as Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), Delroy Lindo (Sinners), and Stellan Skarsgãrd (Sentimental Value). However, he came into the night as the heavy favorite, having win the same prize at the Actor’s Awards and BAFTAs, making it even more notable that he didn’t turn up to collect the gold statue.

How Many Oscars Sean Penn Has Won

Sean Penn joins the rarified air of having now won three acting Oscars. He’s only the eighth person in history to achieve this feat, and the fourth male actor to do so. After failing to win from his first three nominations, he then won for the next two. Both previous wins were both for Best Actor, for Mystic River at the Oscars 2004, and Milk at the 2009 ceremony. The other actors and actresses to win three or more Oscars are:

• Katherine Hepburn (4)
• Meryl Streep (3)
• Jack Nicholson (3)
• Ingrid Bergman (3)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (3)
• Frances McDormand (3)
• Walter Brennan (3)

Why Wasn’t Sean Penn At The Oscars 2026?

There has not been an official explanation (yet) for Penn’s absence, with Culkin simply noting that he either “couldn’t or didn’t want to” be there. However, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The actor has been missing from several high profile awards shows throughout the season, even despite being nominated: he wasn’t there to collect the award at the SAG’s Actor Awards, nor at the BAFTAs, where, again, he won. Ironically, he did attend the Golden Globes, where he lost out to Skarsgãrd.

This is also nothing new for Penn at the Oscars. The actor actually skipped the ceremony the first three times he was nominated: for Dead Man Walking (1996), Sweet and Lowdown (2000), and I Am Sam (2002). He did, however, turn up for both his previous victories in 2004 and 2009. In 2024, the actor was critical of the Academy Awards, saying ceremonies like it should be seen as “television shows first,” and that it limits cultural expression. His statement [via Variety] also included:

“…I don’t I get very excited about what we’ll call the Academy Awards [except for] when a film like The Florida Project, or I’m Still Here, or, you know, Emilia Perez, of the things that are likely to happen this year expression.

“The Academy have exercised really extraordinary cowardice when it comes to being part of the bigger world of expression, and in fact, have largely been part of limiting the imagination and very limiting of different cultural expressions.”

Similarly, in 2023, he told Variety that he had considered meltdown down his Oscar statues. This came after the Academy rejected having Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak at the ceremony, and then that night saw Will Smith slap Chris Rock. Penn said: “I’ll give them to Ukraine. They can be melted down to bullets they can shoot at the Russians.” While that didn’t happen, he revealed he did give away one of his statues to Zelenskyy.

Of course, while his past comments are interesting, that doesn’t mean Penn’s absence from this year’s ceremony was connected to that, as there could be several possible explanations. Whatever the reason, Penn did join the historic club of actors to have won three actors, a momentous achievement regardless of whether he was there or not.