Benedict Cumberbatch: ‘America needs a gay president’
By Sam Rigby
Benedict Cumberbatch has said that the US needs to elect a gay president.
Speaking about Barack Obama’s legacy when he leaves the White House in 2016, the actor said that a female president should take his place, followed by a gay politician.
He told The Daily Beast: “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.
“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.’
“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 will next star as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, which will open the 2014 London Film Festival in October.
Speaking about how long it took for Turing to get a pardon, after being prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, he said: “It’s disgusting. It gets me very, very angry.”
> Watch Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in biopic trailer
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