Last fall, photographer Lucas Passmore drove out to Point Dume, a semi-private beach in Malibu, to do a test shoot with new model Dylan Penn.
Dylan pulled into the parking lot at 3 p.m., right on time, dressed casually in a long-sleeve, gray T-shirt, jean shorts and flip-flops.
While Dylan got her makeup done, she chatted with Passmore about how she’d been delivering pizzas in Westwood, across from the UCLA campus, and working as a production assistant on indie films. She explained she was only trying modeling to earn some extra cash.
But she was a natural.
The 21-year-old, 5-foot-7 beauty ran along the breaking waves in a simple black bikini, without a hint of self-consciousness.
It was only after the two-hour shoot ended that Passmore made a confession to the model.
“OK, I’ve been holding back,” the photographer said. “But you look so much like your mother, it is unbelievable.”
“Thank you,” Dylan replied as she broke into a huge smile. “That is the biggest compliment.”
You wouldn’t know it from her down-to-earth demeanor, but Dylan’s parents — Robin Wright and Sean Penn — are Hollywood royalty.
“I know ‘Princess Bride’ by heart. I’m a child of the ’80s, and Robin Wright is Buttercup,” Passmore, 33, tells The Post of the film that made Robin famous. “I got kind of fluttery when [Dylan] looked at me three-quarters turned, the same way Buttercup looks at Westley. She looks exactly like her mom in that movie.”
But in spite of their stellar genes and A-list pedigree, Dylan, now 22, and her younger brother, Hopper, 20, have managed to keep low profiles — until recently.
The two made a splash on the red carpet last week, arriving with Mom at the Emmys, where Robin was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama for her role on the Netflix series “House of Cards.” (When Passmore texted Dylan that he was a fan of her mom’s new TV show earlier this year, the supportive daughter responded: “OMG right? She’s amazing.”)
The Penn kids looked like pros, flanking their beaming mother as the photographers snapped away. Dylan stunned in a strapless, red Ralph Lauren Collection gown, while Hopper looked handsome in a sleek, traditional tux.
Then news hit that Dylan is in a relationship with “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson, 27.
Just last week, a photo taken Sept. 7 of the couple at the Viper Room on the Sunset Strip, for rapper Mickey Avalon’s show, surfaced.
“They’ve been dating a month or two,” a Pattinson source told People magazine last week. “He’s crazy about her.”
The Sunset Strip is a long way from the small, sleepy town of Ross, Calif., outside of San Francisco, where Dylan and Hopper grew up going to the local public schools.
“I didn’t want to raise my kids in this weird, sycophantic society,” Robin told Entertainment Weekly, in 2009, about moving her clan out of Hollywood.
The family bought a $2 million, 10,000-square-foot house across the street from the local fire station in 1996, the year Wright and Penn were married.
Not many more than 2,000 people live in Ross, so everyone in town knew the Penns but gave them their privacy.
“They’d come in for stuff for the bikes,” says Valerie, manager of the Breaking Away Bicycles shop. (She declined to give her last name.) “They just seemed like normal people in town. I’d see [Robin] picking up her kids across the street at the school. Nobody made a big deal of it.”
After Robin and Sean divorced in 2010, they sold their Marin County home, and Robin moved to LA, to be near Dylan, who was attending college there.
After the divorce and move down to Southern California, Hopper spent time living with each of his parents while he finished high school.
But if Dylan is the spitting image of her mom, Hopper, who was named after the actor Dennis Hopper, inherited his dad’s love of adventure, acting and that signature smirk.
In 2009, the then 16-year-old was in a serious skateboarding accident that resulted in emergency brain surgery.
“It had already been eight months of divorce and sh – t, and raising a kid that’s going through the divorce himself, and then this f – – king thing happens,” Sean told Esquire about the accident last year. “He’s 100 percent now, no brain damage — he’s great. Got a few scars, but he’s great. But it was a tough, tough time.”
After recovering from the surgery, Hopper and his friends made a trippy short film in 2011 called “Back in the Game,” about a cowboy who goes on a psychedelic adventure, meeting beautiful models along the way.
The film was produced by Hopper’s friend Justin Misch, now 22, and written by his cousin Alex Wright, 20, son of Robin’s photographer brother, Richard.
“He told me he wanted to try out acting, so we kind of came up with a vehicle for him to explore,” Alex tells The Post.
“We have all been friends for many years now,” Misch says. “We really just wanted to make a cool film, and took matters into our own hands.”
Although the film is less than 10 minutes long and the casting was done via Facebook, Hopper took the gig seriously.
“When it came to working, [Hopper] was pretty serious,” Chelsea Turnbo, 25, a model who played a DJ in the film, recalls. “He was really sweet and really nice. He kind of kept to himself. I don’t know if he was shy or nervous around all the girls.”
Hopper’s Oscar-winning dad got a nearly identical start in films.
Sean also had a famous father — actor and director Leo Penn. And Sean made his acting debut as a teen, in an 8mm short film called “Looking for Someone,” with his Santa Monica High School pals Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.
Hopper’s friends say he wants to graduate to feature films — but for now, he’s just a regular college guy who likes to hang out with his buddies. The trio bonded over skateboarding together.
“He likes to do a lot of outdoors stuff,” his cousin, Alex, says. “We go on hikes and go surfing and hang out.”
Sean, an avid surfer, was photographed in 2011 giving his son lessons.
Another thing Hopper got from Dad? His disdain for paparazzi.
In March, he was caught on camera yelling at a photographer: “F – – k you fool. You’re a f – – king f a – – ot. Shut up you f – – king ni – – er.”
He later apologized, telling TMZ: “I was accosted by paparazzi and made to feel like an animal — threatened and under attack, but that does not condone my own actions. I deeply regret my choice of words.”
Sean has famously had run-ins with photographers, including an incident in the late ’80s that led to jail time.
Hopper and Dylan haven’t been in the spotlight for long, but they’ve got the kind of looks, love interests and explosive personalities that have kept their parents in the papers for years.
Modeling agent Paul Fisher, who encouraged Dylan to get into the business, thinks she’s got the It factor, too.
“I met Robin when she was Dylan’s age, on a photo shoot with [fashion photographer] Herb Ritts. [Mom and daughter are] very similar,” Fisher tells The Post. “Dylan shines a brilliant light when she walks into a room. She has the physical features to excel in our industry but, more importantly, she walks into a room, and you can’t but help notice her . . . irrelevant of who her parents are.”