Benedict Cumberbatch has said he would “take up arms” and “fight to the death” for his beliefs. The actor was speaking in an interview while promoting his new film. The Imitation Game opened the London Film Festival last week.
The film goes on general release November 14. Based on a true story, Cumberbatch plays WWII Nazi code breaker and maths genius Alan Turing who was prosecuted for homosexuality.
In the interview with Out magazine, the Sherlock star revealed: “People are being beheaded in countries right now because of their beliefs or sexual orientations. It’s terrifying. It’s medieval – a beheading! I’d take up arms against someone who was telling me I had to believe in what they believed or they would kill me. I would fight them. I would fight them to the death.”
He added: “I believe, the older you get, you have to have an idea of what’s right or wrong. You can’t have unilateral tolerance. You have to have a point where you go, ‘Well, religious fundamentalism is wrong.'”
Speaking about the fact that Alan Turing received a posthumous pardon from the Queen in 2013, the actor said: “It’s an insult for anybody of authority or standing to sign off on him with their approval and say, ‘Oh, he’s forgiven’. The only person who should be [doing the] forgiving is Turing, and he can’t because we killed him. And it makes me really angry. It makes me very angry.”
The Imitation Game follows the groundbreaking work of Turing as he leads a team at Bletchley Park who develop a machine which decodes intercepted Nazi messages. It allowed the Allies to hasten the end of the war and save thousands of lives. Following the war his achievements remained top secret. As an alternative to a prison sentence for homosexuality, Turing chose to be chemically castrated. He committed suicide in 1954. Watch the trailer for the film below.