Sean Penn surprised New Yorkers when he appeared at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's latest press briefing remotely on Tuesday afternoon.
The I Am Sam star isn't the only actor to join the governor, who has reached celebrity status himself with the popularity of his daily briefings. Chris Rock and Rosie Perez also sat at a social distance from Cuomo during a recent session.
Penn, 59, appeared on camera briefly to announce that his relief organization CORE is opening 11 new COVID-19 testing sites in New York City. CORE is a global response organization that's currently operating COVID-19 testing sites across the United States to allow more people to get tested.
Cuomo explained that while there are more than 800 testing sites across New York, testing is still a problem "in New York City in certain ZIP codes." "The virus did not attack equally. It hit lower-income areas, more minority areas harder,” Cuomo said. “And in New York City, that’s probably most demonstrable," he said.
“I talked to Mr. Penn about this problem in our hotspot ZIP codes and asked if they could help get more testing into those areas, because we don’t have a lot of infrastructure there, and his group came in, they mobilized and they did great work opening up testing sites in a very short period of time that will ramp up the testing in our hot-spot clusters,” Cuomo said. “That combination of good intent and good results, that doesn’t happen often. But when it does it’s special. And it happened with Mr. Penn and CORE and I want to thank him.”
Penn then appeared virtually to announce that he's “very excited about the partnership.”
Cuomo later tweeted about the actor's help and encouraged New Yorkers to get tested.
This wasn't Cuomo's only brush with fame lately. He recently retweeted Ariana Grande, Mariah Carey and the Jonas Brothers, who all showed their support for #Repeal50A, "a New York law that shields police wrongdoing by hiding records of misconduct, complaints, and abuse."
