Benedict Cumberbatch condemns anti-gay extremists

LONDON, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Benedict Cumberbatch says he would fight anti-gay extremists to the death.

The 38-year-old actor declared as much in an interview with Out magazine. Cumberbatch portrays Alan Turing, a real-life mathematician who helped crack the Nazi Enigma code and was later prosecuted for homosexuality, in The Imitation Game, and said he is anxious to keep Turing's story alive as "a parable on the price of intolerance."

"It's not a history lesson -- it's a warning that this could very easily happen again," he asserted. "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 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."

Turing was found dead of an apparent suicide at age 41 in 1954, and Cumberbatch said he is amazed by the anti-gay prejudice that exists today, 60 years later, in Hollywood and elsewhere.

"Human rights movements and sexual and gay rights movements have made huge social progress in the last 40 years, without a doubt, but there's a lot more work to be done," he related. "I think it's extraordinary that every time we get to a point where there's any kind of trouble in society, people are scapegoated very, very, very quickly."

The Imitation Game opens in theaters November 21.