LOS ANGELES, March 15 (Reuters) – Hollywood veteran Sean Penn won his third acting Oscar on Sunday for his supporting role as an obsessed military officer in the political thriller “One Battle After Another.”
Penn, 65, plays Colonel Steven Lockjaw, a white nationalist who is in love with a Black revolutionary while hating everything she and her family stand for.
He “flexes his muscles, grits his teeth, and growls his lines, but somehow threads the needle between truth and caricature,” Brian Tallerico wrote in his review on rogerebert.com.
The actor did not appear to receive the Oscar, his third.
Penn previously won best actor for “Mystic River” in 2004 and “Milk” in 2009. Friends with director Paul Thomas Anderson since the 1990s, he had only worked with him once before, in “Licorice Pizza.”
“Because of Paul’s movie, I’m in a stage of liking acting,” he told W magazine. “But I’ve always got carpentry to fall back on. And surfing.”
This year’s other supporting actor nominees were Benicio Del Toro, also for “One Battle After Another,” Stellan Skarsgård for “Sentimental Value,” Delroy Lindo for “Sinners,” and Jacob Elordi for “Frankenstein.”
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Howard Goller)

