Sean Penn is the overwhelming favorite to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at the 98th Hollywood Academy Awards for his portrayal of the villain in ‘One Battle After Another’, which unintentionally portrayed the commander who led Donald Trump’s major immigration crackdown.
The personification of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s black comedy, has already earned the Californian actor the award in the best supporting actor category at the BAFTA and the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG-AFTRA), awards that traditionally coincide with those chosen by the Academy.
And on specialized forecasting sites like Gold Derby, Penn far outperforms his contenders: Stellan Skarsgård (‘Sentimental Valor’), Delroy Lindo (‘Sinners’), Jacob Elordi (‘Frankenstein’), as well as his co-star Benicio del Toro in ‘One Battle After Another’ (‘One Battle After Another’).
Added to this, Colonel Lockjaw has resonated with the American public by being compared to Greg Bovino, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) chief in California who took the national lead in aggressive immigration raids ordered by the White House.
Images of Penn in character as Lockjaw and Bovino have flooded social media, with messages highlighting the strong similarities between the fictional and real-life characters.
Lockjaw stars as a corrupt military officer whose authority is threatened when an immigration detention center he oversees is attacked by a group of revolutionaries led by Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).
Even Brian McKeon, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management and Resources in Joe Biden’s administration, made a comment on his X account in which he said “it’s amazing” how the movie and Penn’s character “foresaw” Bovino’s burst onto the national scene.
The similarities of Sean Penn’s role with an ICE agent.
The main resemblance between Penn’s character and Bovino is their work, both are charged with dealing with immigration operations at the California-Mexico border and overnight become public figures for their supposed successes.
In the film Lockjaw will not be measured in the tactics used to achieve his goal. Another striking similarity to Bovino, who has been accused of allowing excessive force to be used in immigration raids, especially in Minneapolis, which resulted in the deaths of two Americans.
Over time, the similarities between Lockjaw and Bovino have grown. Although the real-life character does not end up dead like the fictional one, the CBP chief was removed last January from the operations and returned to the border, following a barrage of criticism for the aggressiveness of the operations.
In addition, Bovino was involved in issues related to racial discrimination, as was Penn’s character. Both were also linked to Confederate symbols, according to a report in The American Prospect.
The affinities would not only be between the film character and the real-life one. Bovino and Penn seem to have a common love for the seventh art. The CBP chief confessed in a podcast that he chose to work with immigration authorities after seeing the movie ‘The Border’ with Jack Nicholson.
“I thought I’d get on the other side a little bit and go back and look at it from the other side,” Bovino explained in conversation with another CBP colleague.
For his part, Penn, who has already won two Oscars as best actor for ‘Mystic River’ (2003) and ‘ Milk’ (2008), said in an interview with Vanity Fair that it was enough for him to read a “few pages” of the script of the film that was cooked up for almost 15 years to agree to play Lockjaw.
“I remember the words ‘he goes there’ going around in my head, because I had no idea what the theme would be, what it would address or what it would reflect on our current lives,” the Californian actor told the magazine, reported Agencia EFE.
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