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The Imitation Game's Benedict Cumberbatch: Attempts To Cure Gay People Are "Terrifying"

Benedict Cumberbatch talked to The Daily Beast about his upcoming role in The Imitation Game as as Alan Turing, the British mathematician who cracked the Nazis' Enigma code in WWII and helped create the modern-day computer.

Sadly, Turing was arrested for soliciting sex with an undercover policeman and underwent chemical castration before ultimately taking his own life in 1954.

"He’s not as prominent as he should be," Cumberbatch said of the genius logician. "That’s the tragedy isn’t it, really? You have a guy whose life he cut off himself at 41." Cumberbatch called Turing's marginalization from history "disgusting"—and says he's shocked that people in power still atry to make gay people straight.

There are courses and doctors and meds handed out to “cure” people of their homosexuality, and it’s shocking that it still goes on. It’s also shocking that any time there’s any kind of hardship, the minorities are immediately scapegoated—and that includes homosexuals in Russia and [the fascist] Golden Dawn in Greece...

The minute you start stirring up nationalistic feelings, minorities are the first people to get it because they’re the easiest to scapegoat. It’s terrifying.

Cumberbatch also recounted a story from his childhood about the homophobia in his strict boarding school:

I was 18. Two boys who were just discovered in bed together doing something, and it was shocking. I was just finishing an essay in the school dining hall at breakfast, and I looked out the window and heard a commotion, a pair of feet scampering by, and then a horde just charging after shouting, “Wankers! Faggots!” and I thought, “What the fuck is going on?”

[I later told them that] you have to learn acceptance at this school, and you have to go into the world as a better person, and you have to try and embrace the fact that people are different rather than defining yourself by not being like them. Who cares that they’re gay? You have to coexist.

The Imitation Game arrives in theaters on November 21.  

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