"The Imitation Game" lead star Benedeict Cumberbatch has shrugged off suggestions of similarities between his lead characters in the biopic about famed British WWII code-breaker and father of computer science Alan Turing and his his TV show "Sherlock."
"He doesn't swish around in a coat and curly hair, demonstrating how brilliant he is; he's a very quiet, stoic and yeah, someone who is smart. But the way he has to operate as an outsider and as someone who is at all different is something that was very much out of the conditions of his life," he told a press conference in London ahead of that evening's opening of the BFI London Film Festival, Wednesday. "I didn't read the script and go 'oh, this is Sherlock in tweed, messing around with valves."
Despite helping crack the Nazu Enigma code and bring about the end of WWII, Turing was prosecuted byt the British Government in 1952 for homosexuality at a time when it was criminalized.
After having chemical castration treatment, he later killed himself in 1954 at the age of 41.
Cumberbatch claimed that taking on such a character was a significant responsibility.
"The idea of getting a broader story out there, a broader picture of him to a broader audience, is something that does bear a certain weight of importance," he said. "It's his legacy. This has been an extraordinary decade for him, because of pardons, because of his centenary, because of exhibitions and books and now this film. It's part of a momentum I hope to have him at the forefront of the recognition he deserves as a scientist, as a father of the modern computer age and a man who lived an uncompromising life in the time of disgusting discrimination."
"The Imitation Game" has its European premiere at London's Leicester Square Wednesday,
