Cumberbatch To Take In Lead The THE IMITATION GAME

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch has been a busy fellow of late. Following his rocketing to success on the strength of his performance in the BBC series Sherlock, the actor has found himself inundated with offers that have lead him to working on the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness, Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films, Terry Jones’s comedy Almost Anything and a film on the life of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein among others. And now he is adding the lead in the biopic The Imitation Game to the list.

Deadline is reporting that the actor is in talks to headline the film.

The film focuses on the life of Alan Turing, a mathematician who helped the British break the Nazi’s purported “unbreakable” cypher machine , while the theories he developed during and after the war were instrumental in the creation of the computer. Tragically, in 1952 he was prosecuted for being a homosexual, which was still a crime in Great Britain at that time, and died two years later, a probable suicide.

The screenplay topped the 2011 Black List and was being developed at Warners as a possible project for Leonardo DiCaprio though he never became formally attached. The studio finally dropped the project last August, allowing producers Nora Grossman and Ido Ostrowsky to produce the film independently.