Keira Knightley set to star with Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘The Imitation Game’

Reports confirm that Keira Knightley is set to star opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in director Morten Tyldum’s (Headhunters) The Imitation Game.

The story centers on a brilliant British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, and his breaking of the German enigma code at the end of World War II, his prosecution by his own government for being a homosexual and his resulting suicide.

With Cumberbatch in the lead role, Knightley would play “a woman from a very conservative background who not only forms a complicated relationship with Turing but is there for him until the end,” according to THR.

Deadline adds “This is the 2011 Black List script that originally got set at Warner Bros with Leonardo DiCaprio expected to star. In what seems shocking today, the hero was forced to make a radical choice, and he chose chemical castration over prison. He was so demoralized that he eventually committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. Black Bear is fully financing.”

Teddy Schwarzman is producing with Nora Grossman andIdo Ostrowsky of Ampersand Pictures.

The budget for the indie is in the $15 million range.

On Alan Turing: During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. (Wikipedia)