Was a gay sex scene removed from Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game?
A gay sex scene was present in an early draft of Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, but was reportedly cut from the final film.
Gay World War II codebreaker Alan Turing – often hailed as the grandfather of modern computing – was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 after having sex with a man, and was chemically castrated, barred from working for GCHQ, and eventually driven to suicide.
However, the upcoming biopic of Turing’s life, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, attracted criticism after the Sherlock star defended the absence of gay sex in the film, saying: “If you need to see that to understand that he’s gay, then all is lost for any kind of subtle storytelling. It’s not something that needed to be made obvious.”
However, The Sunday Times reports that there was indeed a sex scene involving Turing and another man present in early drafts – but it was mysteriously left out of the final version.
Columnist Jonathan Dean wrote: “I have seen an earlier version of the script for The Imitation Game, the Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch, that has the heroic gay mathematician and another man ‘tugging off each other’s clothes’, ‘hungry’ for sex. ‘We see something raw and real and truly human in Alan that we’ve never seen before. He’s not a machine after all’, it reads.
“But you won’t see this in the film. The Enigma machine aside, its focus is on Turing’s relationship with a woman, Joan (Keira Knightley), and much of the press will — and should — ask why that is.
“The Imitation Game script I read is the original, by an American, Graham Moore, with revisions by J Blakeson, a British writer/director.
“But then Moore took his script back, cut Blakeson, and — via the director Morten Tyldum — put together a film sellable as a soft thriller with that nice man off Sherlock.”
