With WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and Sherlock Holmes behind him, Benedict Cumberbatch is having quite a run of outsider savants with a flair for the unexpected. Next up, he plays man-of-the-moment Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Turing’s flair for the unexpected extended to cracking the Nazi’s Enigma code in World War II and providing the Allies with a war-winning advantage. NaziLeaks, if you like.
This first-look pic shows Cumberbatch in action at Bletchley Park, aka Station X, as the maths genius surveys one of the massive Colossus computers built to decrypt the enemy ciphers. Click on the image for a closer look. Headhunters’ Morten Tyldum has been calling the shots on The Imitation Game, working from a script by Graham Moore which itself adapts Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma. Cumberbatch’s Turing, of course, was the legendary mathematician and cryptography expert who helped figure out a code thought uncrackable and provide the key Ultra intelligence on enemy’s tactics and movements on land and sea.
The picture was released via the film’s Twitter page on the day Turing received a long-awaited royal pardon for his conviction for homosexuality, and subsequent chemical castration, in 1952. The bizarre and chastening tale ended with Turing’s suicide in 1954.
Keira Knightley, Mark Strong and Matthew Goode round out a strong-looking cast we should be able to see in action later in 2014.