Multiple award winning actor Benedict Cumberbatch has expressed his repulsion against against religious extremism and has said that he would fight to the death to defend one’s right to express one’s sexuality, in an interview with Out magazine cited by The Guardian. The actor lamented the horrors faced by gay people in many countries, and has expressed his determination to stand by them.
“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. And, 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.’”
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the outstanding Second World War codebreaker in “The Imitation Game”, a movie soon to be released in theaters all over the world. Despite bringing an outstanding contribution to the Allied victory in the war by breaking the German Enigma code, Turing was constantly persecuted and ridiculed because of his sexual orientation. He was arrested in 1952 after his relationship with a young Manchester man was revealed, and was sentenced to chemical castration by injections of synthetic oestrogen in order to eliminate his sexual desire. He continued to work part time for Government Communications Headquarters after the incident, but with his mental health affected, and he has passed away soon after.
“The Imitation Game” should be taken as a warning that those times could easily return, Cumberbatch said. He considers the official pardon handed to Turing – considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence – “an insult for anybody of authority or standing to sign off on him with their approval and say, ‘Oh, he’s forgiven’”. He considers that the only person entitled to forgive in this case is Turing himself, and he can’t, because he was killed by the laws of his times.