Benedict Cumberbatch would like to see an openly gay president in the White House.
"You need to have a female president next, and then after that, a gay president. That’s the full journey from Obama’s legacy onwards," the Emmy-winning "Sherlock" star tells Daily Beast writer Marlow Stern. "There’s a great Morrissey lyric from 'America Is Not the World' from 'You Are the Quarry' that goes, “In America, the land of the free, they said/And of opportunity, in a just and truthful way/But where the president is never black, female or gay, and until that day/You’ve got nothing to say to me, to help me believe.'"
He went on to note, "It’s quite an old song from before Obama took office, but you’ve done black, then you need to do female, then the next, gay."
Cumberbatch, 38, returns to the big screen as Alan Turing, the British mathematician and World War II codebreaker who was convicted of "gross indecency" after engaging in a same-sex relationship, in the highly anticipated new film, "The Imitation Game." The movie, which debuted at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival, has already been hailed as "the best British film of the year" and is currently slated for a November release.
One of the film's most noteworthy sequences depicts Turing's chemical castration, which the mathematician accepted in lieu of a custodial sentence before committing suicide in 1954.
Cumberbatch, who says he witnessed "incredible homophobia" while attending an all-boys' boarding school as an adolescent, compared Turing's sentence to the types of reparative, or "ex-gay," therapy methods which still exist today.
"There are courses and doctors and meds handed out to 'cure' people of their homosexuality, and it’s shocking that it still goes on," he noted. "It’s also shocking that any time there’s any kind of hardship, the minorities are immediately scapegoated—and that includes homosexuals in Russia, the Golden Dawn in Greece ... it's terrifying."
Read the full Daily Beast interview with Cumberbatch here.
Watch the trailer for "The Imitation Game" below:
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