Telegraph article copied below for anyone that wants to read. Nothing I've not read before though. No new photos either.
There is, at first, a moment of confusion. Benedict Cumberbatch is filming Richard III for the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, and yesterday, or so the publicist from the film company tells me, he fell off a horse. He’s feeling stiff and has needed a massage. Things are running a little late.
It is Saturday lunchtime at a grand London hotel, and I am parked in a suite waiting to talk to Cumberbatch about his latest film, The Imitation Game, in which he plays the code-breaker Alan Turing. When he comes in – tall and rangy, dressed in a checked shirt and a quilted leather jacket – he moves and talks quickly, a fistful of nervous energy. Shades of Sherlock.
I hear, I say, that you’ve had an accident and fallen off your horse. He looks puzzled. ‘Oh no, that’s picking up fag ends...’ Fag ends? ‘That thing of going, “He’s had an accident...”’ He rolls his eyes. ‘I haven’t had an accident. I'm playing Richard III.’ Nor, it turns out, had he fallen off a horse. He can do all his own sword-fighting, but falling off horses is forbidden under insurance provisions: he just fell into shot, as if he’d fallen off a horse.
‘I was running round in the mud having a lot of fun. I mean proper mud, with men in real armour with real swords, fighting to the death. It was incredible – one of those moments where I had to pinch myself.’
Cumberbatch is not classically handsome: rather, the long, angled planes of his face and his small, far-apart eyes lend him a slightly odd, other-worldly, cerebral appearance. He is an actor who is particularly good at giving the impression of thinking, which has served him well playing roles such as Stephen Hawking, Sherlock and, indeed, Turing. So not quite handsome, yet that curious, transmogrifying power of stardom seems to have conferred handsomeness upon him.
He has an army of adoring female fans that style themselves as ‘Cumberbitches’ – a term to which Cumberbatch himself has taken vocal exception in the past. ‘It sets feminism back so many notches.’ He apparently would prefer the term ‘Cumberpeople’.
The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who, working at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, invented the early computing machine that cracked the German Enigma code. Winston Churchill, a huge admirer of Turing, credited him with making the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. This alone makes Turing a heroic figure, but it is what happened later that makes him equally a tragic one.
Homosexual, in 1952 Turing was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ with a 19-year-old man. As an alternative to prison, he was ordered to receive treatment with oestrogen injections – chemical castration. In 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, Turing died from cyanide poisoning. An inquest ruled that his death was suicide. In 2009, following an internet campaign, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the government for ‘the appalling way’ Turing had been treated. And in 2013 he was granted a posthumous pardon by the Queen.
The Imitation Game covers the span of Turing’s life: his faltering, adolescent love for a fellow student at Sherborne school, Christopher Morcom, who was to die at 18 from the long-term effects of the bovine tuberculosis he contracted as a child; his struggle at Bletchley Park to build his ‘Turing machine’ in the face of official obduracy and incomprehension; his short, and ill-starred, engagement to his colleague Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley); and his tragic death.
It is the sort of film the British film industry does so well. Highly polished, with a sterling cast including Charles Dance and Matthew Goode, and an impressive attention to period detail, it is also deeply moving. One comes away seething with anger at the attitudes and the events – ‘the persecution’ in Cumberbatch’s words – that destroyed Turing.
‘I miss him...’ Cumberbatch settles back on to the sofa, dispatching an espresso in a single gulp. ‘And it’s not just from playing him. I miss the fact that he’s not with us and should be with us. It’s a massive injustice, of course, but it’s also thinking about what he should have enjoyed of his life as well, and the amount of sadness in it.’
‘Mother says I’m just an odd fish,’ an adolescent Turing tells Morcom. And he was certainly that: socially awkward, scornful of convention, a man more interested in ideas than people, who believed the only authority worth respecting was reason.
Cumberbatch's co-stars in The Imitation Game include Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode
It is a role that might have been tailor-made for Cumberbatch, and which he captures beautifully. Photographs show Turing as shorter and stockier, but Cumberbatch’s performance, one thinks, is surely exactly how he sounded and behaved – although, surprisingly perhaps, there is no existing film or audio recording to confirm it.
To build the character, Cumberbatch was obliged to draw on written descriptions and the memories of Turing’s contemporaries. ‘He was described as having his head down to one side and not making eye contact,’ Cumberbatch says, tipping his head. ‘When he did turn and talk to you he had a wonderful smile and was charismatic and encouraging – and polite and fast – but slowed by this pronounced speech impediment that went...’ – his voice begins to rise – ‘very high in pitch, as well as getting stuck on w-w-words.’
He has, for an instant, become Turing, and just as quickly turned back into Cumberbatch. ‘So it’s about building the elements of that into the storytelling. Of course, you have to compromise because it’s only two hours long. If the stammer was as severe as it actually was in any given moment, it would have been a longer film. And that’s not supposed to be a joke; it’s just a fact.’
‘I spoke to his two nieces,’ he adds. ‘Even though they were very young, what they remembered clearly was feeling confident when he was around because he treated them as human beings – not as things to be seen and not heard; he wasn’t Victorian. And that was a huge eye-opener – oh yes, because he doesn’t differentiate, does he? He doesn’t think gay, straight, child, older, stupid, less stupid. He’s not making those judgments.’
Alan Turing aged 16 PHOTO: Getty Images
Turing’s sexuality is central to the film. In an age when to be homosexual was to court certain social opprobrium, Turing was necessarily discreet but never apologetic. The police officer who arrested him would later note that he made no attempt to conceal what he had done, instead volunteering a five-page statement outlining his activities – written ‘in a flowing style, almost like prose’. Turing, he concluded, was ‘a very honourable man’.
As the film makes clear, his brief engagement to Joan Clarke was based, at least on Turing’s part, on intellectual compatibility rather than any physical attraction. Turing broke it off when he realised that it was impossible to maintain such a relationship, telling Clarke that he was homosexual.
Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, on whose book The Imitation Game is loosely based, has been reported as saying the film exaggerates Clarke’s role in Turing’s life. And some critics have taken it to task for not being ‘sexually explicit’ enough, on the grounds that there are no scenes of Turing sexually involved with another man. His feelings for Morcom are conveyed by no more than longing glances.
Cumberbatch is mystified by the criticism. ‘For me there’s explicit love in the film, and the fact of his sexuality being homosexual doesn’t make any difference. If it would have added to the film, we’d have done it. I’d have no qualms about filming those scenes, expressing that side of a character’s relationship to his body. It’s partly to do with the logical loop of the film, the poetical loop. It’s about what’s not seen, it’s about secrets, what’s repressed – and his sexuality was. This is a man who’s never going to be allowed to love, and that’s really his tragedy and the tragedy of the film.’
Andrew Hodges has noted that the field in which Turing was a pioneer was ‘not “science”, not “applied mathematics”, but a sort of applied logic, something that had no name’. There is always a danger in any film attempting to depict genius that the complexity of their work will be lost on a general audience – a pitfall that The Imitation Game avoids by demonstrating that Turing’s genius was of a rarefied kind, and that his invention for mechanically decoding messages was a revolutionary breakthrough, without belabouring us with the details of exactly how.
The Bombe code-breaking machine Turing devised at Bletchley Park during the Second World War PHOTO: Getty Images
Cumberbatch achieved a B in GCSE maths – not quite enough, he acknowledges, to ‘even handle a quadratic equation’. But he devoted a good deal of time – ‘probably more than I should have done’ – to trying to understand Turing’s work. ‘I’m determined to manufacture at least the appearance of mastering whatever it is the character has to master, because otherwise there’s no point. But also, just as a layman, I’m fascinated by it. He was making a massive leap forward in the idea of anything computable being mechanised. It was the beginning of the binary coding of computers. Within that, he wrote some of the most extraordinary algorithms, which were used to break the Enigma code, and which are still used in web-search programs like Google today.’
Turing is the second real person Cumberbatch has tackled as an actor in almost as many years – he played Julian Assange in the 2013 film The Fifth Estate. ‘I learnt my lesson with Assange that you cannot get too involved in the subject matter; that you have to focus on the character,’ he says. ‘But at the same time that was such a current story I wanted to do him justice; I didn’t want to serve him up as being some kind of two-dimensional villain. I wanted to make him into a flawed hero basically.’
Is that how he sees Assange? He stiffens slightly. ‘I’ve talked a lot about how I see him. You can dig up a quote from before and use that if you like.’
It’s a sore point. Assange objected to Cumberbatch playing him in the film, to the point of writing him a letter (which Wikileaks published, along with a copy of the script) begging him to withdraw – ‘which was incredibly beautiful, charming, polite, very persuasive, charismatic…’ Cumberbatch rattles off the adjectives.
Really? I thought it was deeply creepy, a mixture of flattery and veiled threat. For instance, ‘I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film... If the film reaches distribution we will forever be correlated in the public imagination. Our paths will be forever entwined…’
Cumberbatch raises his eyebrows, cups his hand over his mouth and whispers, ‘I know.’
PHOTO: Platon
‘There was a huge amount of passive aggression in that. I’m not stupid. I knew what he was doing; I knew that he was blindsiding me with praise, thinking my ego would be massaged by some fat, fictitious pay cheque or the idea of being “a movie star” by playing him, and that would persuade me to be some talking piece for the State Department. I wrote back a very strong email that, unless he shows it, will never see the light of day. It’s one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever done, I’m proud to say, and he was very polite in response. But I don’t feel the need to publish that correspondence, and I’m not going to talk about it.’
None the less it is interesting that, like The Fifth Estate, The Imitation Game should be dealing with the question of secrets, particularly given the revelations last year about the surveillance programmes of GCHQ, the government spy centre that grew out of Bletchley Park.
‘It sort of is, but more important is the idea that the man at the centre of it, who was persecuted for being different, still stands sadly for a lot of persecution that goes on around the world today. That’s what terrifies me – that it's as prevalent now, and that this is how we treated one of our war heroes, and a great scientist, someone who’s up there with Charles Darwin; he should be on banknotes. I don’t think Alan set himself up as a martyr, but he sure as hell was treated as one in a sense.’
Cumberbatch’s voice rises in indignation. ‘This was 60 years ago – here, in this country! Giving a man injections to turn him into something desexualised, that ruined his brain. He was being given weekly oestrogen doses and at one point the doctor said, this is a bit embarrassing for both us; why don’t I give you an implant so you don’t have to keep coming back for these appointments every week. He was given the implant in his thigh. It was supposed to stop after two years, and it didn’t.
‘A colleague of his whom I spoke to told me Turing had said, “It’s not really cricket, is it” – being wry and humorous about it. But then one night he pulled out a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and tried to gouge it out of his body.’ Cumberbatch sighs deeply. ‘To reach that state of mind... The only thing he had left to love – that he was legally allowed to love – was his work, and even that was denied him, to the extent that he took his own life by swallowing cyanide.’
Code-breakers at Bletchley Park in 1942 PHOTO: Getty Images