Benedict Cumberbatch would fight anti-gay extremists 'to the death'

“I’d take up arms against someone who was telling me I had to believe in,” said the actor

Benedict Cumberbatch plays genius codebreaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (Getty Images)

Benedict Cumberbatch says that he would defend his belief in gay rights to the very end.

The actor currently stars in The Imitation Game as persecuted gay mathematician Alan Turing, who broke the Enigma code used by the Nazis during World War II.

In an interview with Out magazine, Cumberbatch said: “People are being beheaded in countries right now because of their beliefs or sexual orientations”, going to describe the beheadings as “medieval” and “terrifying”.

He added that he’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.”

Cumberbatch said that it isn’t possible to have “unilateral tolerance”.

“You have to have a point where you go, ‘Well, religious fundamentalism is wrong,’ ” he said.

He noted that being an openly gay actor is still problematic in the number of roles available.

“I think if you’re going to sell yourself as a leading man in Hollywood,” he said, “to say ‘I’m gay,’ sadly, is still a huge obstacle. We all know actors who are [gay] who don’t want to talk about it or bring it up, or who deny it. I don’t really know what they do to deal with it.”

Cumberbatch has said before that he tried to change the homophobic views of his fellow students while he was at school at Harrow – an institution which, he claims, had “a really low tolerance for homosexuality”.

In July 2013, Cumberbatch officiated the gay marriage of his friends, Seth Cummings and Rob Rinder, in Ibiza.