Sean Penn has always been a fearless actor, known for taking on gritty roles in his adult acting career in projects that mean something on a deeper level, characters that often tap into the social consciousness of today's real world challenges. Penn's latest role as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office in San Francisco who was later murdered, pushes the envelope at a time when the progression of gay rights in America has taken a step back due to the ongoing clash between two opposing world views. While the fight for gay marriage rights continues in California, Sean Penn stars with Josh Brolin, James Franco, and Emile Hersch in director's Gus Van Sant's Milk, which chronicles Harvey Milk's battle to fight prejudice in an effort to make a difference not only in public office but for the gay community at large.

While doing press for Milk, Penn's honesty was front and center as he spoke to journalists about preparing to play Harvey Milk, the real issue underneath the "issues" as the debate over Proposition 8 continues, and how the world would be a better place if Harvey Milk hadn't have been murdered.

What drew you in to make you have to be part of this movie?

SEAN PENN: I don’t know if there’s such thing as being scared to make a movie, but there were challenges in this that were exciting. Primarily for me it started with Gus Van Sant, I think that all of us here - any actor with a hunger to participate in something fantastic wants to work with Gus. So it was that, and then when he gave me Lance’s sensational script, and so it seemed like no-brainer to want to do it. Then of course I could lay on top of that all the particular values that this story and Harvey Milk’s life have, but that would take a long time. But those were the initial things. It was a wonderfully written script with one of the great directors.

How did you prepare to portray Harvey Milk?

PENN: Well, the documentary and also additional archival footage was, I’m sure, very helpful. I say that a little vaguely because with that sort of thing the best way you can use it is just watch a lot the same way you’d play music all day in the background and not necessarily be thinking about it. I kept it on all the time and over a period of time little synapses start to connect, and if you listen carefully you can hear the music of that and you kind of dance with it. But that, and, of course, what Lance wrote. It comes from all directions, but it was clear, at least in terms of - for lack of a better term - character choice, the most exciting version of Harvey Milk, to me, was Harvey Milk. And if you see the documentary, the guy is the movie star of that documentary. He’s an electric, warm guy, so you just reach and reach and reach. You never assume you’re going to get all the way there, but you figure that with the help of a director and a screenwriter and all the other things that a movie is, that you can get the spirit of it up as best you can.

How did meeting the people who knew Harvey affect your performance?

PENN: I think Lance summed it up when he said those people being part of it created an extended family. You always hear about how part of director’s job is setting the tone, the environment on a set and a kind of broader version of that, I guess, is just the spirit of something, the way that everybody in anything creative works. You know, you try to let the spirit move you. Well, there was a lot of spirit around, and by spirit it means, of course, practical information, which sometimes can help. Sometimes it can overload you, it depends. From the cast of this movie, it’s was one of these movies where if the director’s job is to create an environment, well, he did. And that included that, all of those people being there was, very - very guiding.

How did Harvey stay with you while you were playing him? How has he changed you as a person?

PENN: The answer is he did stay with me. How? I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t given it a lot of thought. I just - if something comes in and you become aware of it, it’s there, you leave it alone so it doesn’t go away. In terms of humanly, you know, one likes to think that with each day and each person that comes into their life directly or indirectly, that there’s some kind of growth of some kind, hopefully in a positive direction. With him, it would have been but I can’t identify - certainly in very immediate way there’s been a lot of, let’s say timeliness to this story that we’ve all been thinking about and referencing this recent experience we had, but I can’t be more specific than that.

Can you talk about how it affected your daily life?

PENN: My daily life consists of getting up at six o’clock in the morning and making sure I’ve got my words together, that my kids are off to school or are going to wake up in time if I leave before them for work. And then I’m at work all day, then I’m exhausted going home and working with the kids, learning a bunch more lines for the next day. So, I don’t know that I had a daily life other than what’s on the screen.

Can you talk about how you hope this film underscores gay rights issues?

PENN: Even the word "issue" about this, it’s only an issue because of ignorance in the first place. I think if you could criminalize a lack of - we don’t have an excuse of being ignorant of the law. If we could have no excuse to being ignorant to human history, then, in fact, any support, for example, of Proposition 8, would be, minimally, manslaughter, because human history tells us there’s going to be teenage boys who hang themselves out of a reach for identity they can’t get in part because of things like the "issues" like this, precious words like this and all of the things, the whole history that any civil rights movement has had. So as long as it’s an issue, it’s an obscenity. And if this movie is part of an engine to help reveal that, that’s going to make all of us really happy and proud.

Can you talk about the animosity between the Christian and gay communities?

PENN: I think it’s important to remember and remind people that the tension’s not between the gay and the faith communities, the tension’s between a gay community which, in fact, really is gay, and a pseudo faith community that has nothing to do with God, love or anything of real faith. And it’s really just hypocrisy and hatred. Any faith community that deserves the title, "faith community" really won’t have a problem with these issues.

Can you comment on the parallels between Harvey Milk and Barack Obama in terms of them being galvanizing figures?

PENN: Well, that’s the first thing that hits any of us, I guess, because the word, "hope". And I think at that moment in time, particularly relative to the gay community in San Francisco that he was running to represent, it was such a necessary part of what he was offering, and similarly today for the whole world on any issue; anything that represents hope - this might be our last shot at hope. And so, yeah, there’s those obvious parallels but I mean I’m not going to tell you anything you’re not going to write without me.

Can you talk about the sexuality in the film? It’s seems so incidental.

PENN: Well, Cleve Jones said something really great early on. He put together a dinner with a lot of the people who’d been involved in Harvey’s campaign. He said one of the myths is that we’re all just the same, it’s just the sex that’s different. He said, 'In reality we’re very different, it’s just the sex that’s pretty much the same.' And the difference, of course, is living with bigotry and oppression and all of that sort of shit. And that was something where the focus went. The rest of it is, you know, some people, a guy gives them a boner, for somebody else it’s a woman. It was an approach - the sex is the sex is the sex, but the other part was really the heart of the picture.

Did you have any thoughts on how the world would be a better place had Harvey not been murdered?

PENN: I think less people would have died of Aids. I think Ronald Reagan would have been forced to address it, and it was a tragic loss. He wouldn’t have stood quietly. He would have known - he was a leader and he happened to be focused on the gay movement, and because the impression was that this was initially, popularly the notion it was a gay disease, and certainly huge numbers of homosexuals died related to it, I think he would have advanced that argument a lot sooner. I think people are dead because he died too soon.