Benedict Cumberbatch’s fans accept no imitations. But will the dedicated fanbase accept their beloved leading man in Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game?
The photo, shared via the upcoming movie’s official Twitter feed, arrives in a timely fashion. Cumberbatch plays mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who helped crack codes for the Brits during World War II. It was Turing who helped crack Germany’s Enigma code. Later, the war hero was prosecuted for his homosexuality. Thanks for your help, Alan! Now face our wrath.
Queen Elizabeth II, though, recently issued a Royal Pardon for Turing, and the producers behind Cumberbatch’s latest jumped on the opportunity for a little free press by sharing an image for the drama, which at the moment has no release date.
For a while, it felt as if Cumberbatch was in everything. You actually can go to a theater right now and see (or hear) him in two films: August: Osage County, where he plays a Midwestern simpleton; and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, where he voices a dragon. As if that doesn’t speak enough to the amazing actor’s range, he also appeared in a mini-episode teasing his return as Sherlock Holmes in the wildly entertaining BBC series. Look for it early next year.
Needless to say, Cumberbatch is as versatile as they come, and it sounds like he has a slew of interesting projects in the hopper to keep his fans entertained. I know very little about Turing. And Hollywood’s few attempts at telling dramatic stories about war-time codebreakers looked too much like this:
There are going to be a handful of WWII movies coming out in 2014. I’m not sure how long we’ll have to wait to see Imitation Game, but George Clooney has circled Feb. 7 for his caper-comedy The Monuments Men, which will send the likes of Matt Damon, Bill Murray and John Goodman behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany.
I doubt Cumberbatch’s movie will contain the same number of laughs. But if the Cumber-bitches turn out in droves, the movie should do better than The Fifth Estate at the box office.
