There's a reason we don't see outspoken actor Sean Penn visiting Miami more often. Probably because the Hollywood star who keeps warm company with the likes of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro would be accosted every time he walks down the street. Kind of like he was by former co-star and Cuban-American actress Maria Conchita Alonso at the Los Angeles Airport recently.
Alonso, who was born in Cuba but raised in Venezuela, starred with Penn in the 1988 film Colors. She played a gang member who struck up a relationship with Penn's police officer character. Though, since the '80s she's become an outspoken critic of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, while Penn has publicly befriended the dictator. She wrote an open letter to Penn in 2010 criticizing his friendship with Chavez.
Earlier this month she was at LAX picking up her mother from a flight from Miami when she just so happened to spot Penn in the lost baggage area. That's when all hell broke loose.
Reports Page Six:
She told Page Six: "I was very calm. I said, 'I would like to talk to you.' He said, 'I have nothing to say to you . . . You have been saying a lot of things about me in the press.' I said, 'How can you defend Chavez?' ""I only knew that a hostile woman was nonsensically berating me," Penn told Page Six in response. "I didn't realize it was that actress. I think I worked with her once. But she looks really different. She was uninformed and impolite to all the other passengers."
The argument escalated from there. Alonso relates: "I said, 'You are a communist, Sean Penn.' He said, 'You are a pig!' So I said, 'And you are a communist [bleep]hole! Is it great to live the way you do as a communist?'
"I went back to my mother, and he started yelling at us," Alonso told us. "I yelled back, 'Communist [bleep]hole!' Nearly 60 people were watching, shocked. My mother wanted to clap, but she couldn't because she was in a wheelchair and she had a small dog in her lap."
Oh, taking a dig at a woman's look Penn? Real classy. It's not like you're looking very Spicoli lately either.
Alonso originally told her story to DC radio host Steve Malzberg:
Follow Miami New Times on Facebook and Twitter @MiamiNewTimes.
