Fellow history nerds, rejoice. A biopic of World War II codebreaker extraordinaire/tragic life story subject Alan Turing has been in the works for a year or two. A script for the movie, called The Imitation Game, was put on the Black List (a list of scripts that industry folks are talking about but that haven’t been picked up yet) back in 2011, and last December the film got a director in the form of Morten Tyldum. And now Deadline is reporting that it’s close to having a star, too: Benedict Cumberbatch.
Cumberbatch, could you stop picking up new projects already? First it was Star Trek Into Darkness and The Hobbit, and now it’s the WikiLeaks movie, 12 Years a Slave, that weird-sounding Monty Python movie, August: Osage County, and a rumored Brian Epstein biopic. We’re never going to get season three of Sherlock at this rate.
The actor is reportedly in “deep conversations” to play Turing, who was instrumental in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma Code and was thanked by the British government with a conviction for homosexuality in the early 1950s. Given the choice between jail time and a hormonal treatment colloquially known as “chemical castration,” Turing chose the latter. After a year he committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.
Sherlock griping aside, I’m seriously looking forward to this, though less for Cumberbatch and more for general history nerdery and Tyldum. He directed the excellent Norwegian crime thriller Headhunters, which was one of my top five movies of 2012, easy. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan I recommend you watch it, as it has Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) playing this really awesome bad guy, and… OK, sorry. Got distracted. But it’s great, you should watch it. Hopefully The Imitation Game will be great, albeit horribly depressing, too.