Sean Penn Calls Career Time-Out, Skips Stooges

Tue., Jun. 16, 2009 4:05 PM PDT by Natalie Finn

FAME PICTURES

If there's anyone who might just want to focus on his family for awhile, it's Sean Penn.

The Oscar-winning star has pulled out of his next two scheduled film projects, including the Farrelly brothers' Three Stooges update, E! News confirmed Tuesday.

Penn, who has broken up and made up with wife Robin Wright Penn twice over the past 18 months, recently wrapped the true-story CIA drama Fair Game, in which he played the husband of outed agent Valerie Plame.

But instead of starring as a prosecutor who goes after the mob in the drama Cartel and then taking on the role of Larry Fine in the Stooges comedy this fall, alongside the dream team of Benicio Del Toro and Jim Carrey as Moe and Curly Howard...Penn is taking a break.

Not that he wouldn't have taken a bottle to the head later.

"We indeed informed both productions that Sean was not available now," Penn's publicist, Mara Buxbaum, tells E! News. "If for whatever reason the start dates on these productions were to be postponed, Sean would happily remain involved."

He and the missus patched things up yet again last month, a few weeks after Sean requested a legal separation. Wright Penn filed for divorce in December 2007 but withdrew her petition the following April.

They have two teenage children together.