If you need a fiendish code cracking, Benedict Cumberbatch is your man. The prolific actor and Star Trek: Into Darkness baddie is to play Alan Turing in a feature film about the brilliant mathematician, whose work at Bletchley Park during World War II helped crack the Germans” seemingly impossible Enigma code.

The Imitiation Game comes from Black Bear Pictures in New York, and is due to shoot in the UK from mid-September with Morten Tyldum helming.

And Cumberbatch is, of course, still wearing the famous deerstalker hat of that much loved cerebral genius, Sherlock Holmes. The updated re-imagining, penned by Mark Gatiss, transplants Holmes and his erstwhile sidekick Watson (played by Martin Freeman) to contemporary London, and is full intricate homages, nods and tributes to many of the tropes of the much loved original books by Conan Doyle.

Filming continues in Cardiff on series 3 of the Hartswood Films/BBC Wales drama, with the third and final episode of the latest run due to wrap at the end of August.

Two more roles that Cumberbatch has recently notched up are those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate and engineered superhuman Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek: Into Darkness – neither of whom are exactly slouches in the brains department either…

Further information on The Imitation Game, Sherlock and The Fifth Estate can be found on Production Intelligence, the online database of advance production news from The Knowledge.