Sean Penn‘s teenage son may want to do as dad says, not as he does. Penn’s 19-year-old son Hopper let his temper get the best of him on Tuesday, March 26, when he got into a verbal tussle with a nearby photographer, resulting in a bit of nasty name-calling that was all caught on tape.
In a video shot by a fellow photographer, Penn and Hopper can be seen walking toward a building in Beverly Hills when the paparazzi begin to snap photos of the duo.
The 52-year-old actor doesn’t bother acknowledging the cameras, but Hopper seems to take issue with the photographers, and angrily brushes past one photographer in particular, causing the unidentified paparazzo to cry “What the hell?” angrily.
“You f–king kidding me?” Hopper shot back.
The pair continued their verbal argument as Hopper and Penn continued to walk into the building, with Hopper flipping the photographers off at one point. He then let loose a few expletives, calling the photographer a homosexual slur.
“That the kind of talk you’re teaching him, Sean?” the angered photographer called out as the father-son duo walked into the building.
Hopper topped off his barrage of angry insults with one final slur, calling the African-American photographer a “f–king n—-r.”
The hot-headed teen later issued an apology for his words, claiming that he had only reacted in such a hostile manner because he felt like he was “under attack.”
“I was accosted by paparazzi and made to feel like an animal — threatened and under attack, but that does not condone my own actions,” he wrote. “I deeply regret my choice of words.”
The paparazzo showed police on the scene footage of the angry exchange, but has declined to press charges against the youngster.
Penn himself has had more than his share of tussles with the paparazzi — in 1986, the two-time Oscar winner found a photographer hiding in his hotel bedroom in Macao and allegedly dangled him from the room’s ninth-floor balcony.
