Benedict Cumberbatch on Alan Turing, homophobia in film

Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars in the TIFF gala premiere, The Imitation Game says Alan Turing, the real-life man he portrays in the film, was unjustly ignored in history. “He’s not as prominent as he should be," Cumberbatch said in an interview with The Daily Beast. "That’s the tragedy isn’t it, really?”

Turing was a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst who is thought of as the father of theoretical computer science and invented what is considered the first model of a computer. The film focuses on his work developing the Turing Machine during World War II and his later persecution for being homosexual, which led to his suicide at age 41. "It’s disgusting. It gets me very, very angry," Cumberbatch revealed. "I think he made it look like it could potentially look like an accident so his mother wasn’t disgraced by the idea that her son committed suicide. She was already in denial about his sexuality."

Turing's amazing advances in technology have been left out of the history books because of his sexuality, but with the release of the film, this mindset may begin to change. "You’ve really got to wake up to the fact that the world is full of disgusting prejudice because we are all different from one another," Cumberbatch argued. "Who cares that they’re gay? You have to coexist." ~Kelly Townsend

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