Hollywood actor Antonio Banderas has described homophobes as “sick.”

The 53-year-old Banderas, who is best known for playing Zorro in The Mask of Zorro and portraying the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek franchise and Puss in Boots, made his comments in a wide-ranging interview with Peru's Canal N.

In discussing Director Pedro Almodovar's 1987 film Law of Desire (La Ley Del Deseo), in which he plays a gay man obsessed with a man he cannot have, Banderas said he was struck by how audiences accepted the film's murder plot but were outraged at seeing two men kiss.

“The murder was fine, its something accepted from an artistic point of view,” Banderas said. “But two people of the same sex kissing on screen generated a wave of contradictions at the time.”

Gay people “do not appear to me to be sick, absolutely,” he later added. “Those who judge gay couples in an intolerant way, they seem to me to be much more sick.”

(Related: Antonio Banderas: “Absolutely” in favor of gay marriage.)