CBS News
"My article has failed. Let me be clear, my article has failed," he told Charlie Rose in his first interview about the meeting on Friday's "CBS This Morning."
Penn was able to interview the Mexican drug lord through a famous actress in the country. Months later, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was captured.
But the conversation that followed, Penn believes, wasn't focused on the war on drugs as he had hoped.
"Let's go to the big picture of what we all want," Penn told Rose. "We all want this drug problem to stop. We all want the killings in Chicago to stop. We are the consumer. Whether you agree with Sean Penn or not, there is a complicity there. And if you are in the moral right, or on the far left, just as many of your children are doing these drugs. And how much time have they spent in the last week, since this article came out, talking about that? 1%?"
In the Charlie Rose interview, Penn also denies that his secret meeting led authorities to El Chapo, saying, "There is this myth about the visit that we made, my colleagues and I, that it was - as the attorney general of Mexico is quoted - 'essential' to his capture.
"We had met with him many weeks ago, on October 2. In a place nowhere near where he was captured," Penn went on.
Authorities claimed that they had knowledge of Penn's trip, which allowed them to limit the area in which they could find the drug leader.
The actor landed the meeting with the help of Kate del Castillo, who, as Charlie Rose said, Guzman "was smitten with."
Penn believes that Mexican authorities are making the claim out of embarrassment.
"We know that the Mexican government... They were clearly very humiliated by the notion that someone found him before they did," he said.
More excerpts from the interview will air on "CBS Evening News" and "60 Minutes," and it will air in full on Rose's PBS show.
Watch the interview below: