The Gossip Girl alum detailed his experience as a child actor with what he described as “body dysmorphia.”

“I know that I hated my body,” Penn told The Guardian in April 2025, “and simply wanted a different one.”

In response to the weight he gained following his parents’ divorce, he added,  “There was just a period where, coming out of depression and isolation, I was jumping wilfully into, but also being thrust into, this world where the more conventionally beautiful I seemed, the more successful I might be, the more value I might have.”

Despite the mental struggles, though, Penn credited his ability to persist to his spirituality.

“That is what allowed me to persevere through the disillusionment, all the things I’d been grappling with,” he explained, “and then come back to it all, but with hopefully some kind of inner transformation.”