'Downton Abbey' Star Allen Leech to Join Benedict Cumberbatch’s 'The Imitation Game'

This year five talented Brits have been nominated for an Academy Award. Most of these names are quite familiar to UK film fans; however, before they were delivering inspiring performances and their names appeared on movie theater marquees, they had to pay their dues with small guest appearances in television series and made-for-TV movies.

Let’s take a brief look at their careers before they were Oscar hopefuls…

If the holidays are wrapping up and the cold, dark winter is truly setting in, it can mean only one thing. It’s awards season! For the UK film industry, the greatest accolade that can be bestowed is from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, BAFTA for short, which also happens to the name of the statuette presented to the winners.

On this past Friday, the nominees for the 2015 BAFTAs were announced at the Picadilly headquarters of the Academy itself by perennial host Stephen Fry and his cohort Sam Claflin. While there might have been a few snubs, most of the expected names were announced. Of interest to British movie fans, The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game received multiple nods for acting, screenplay, director and best overall film. Ralph Fiennes, Rosamund Pike and Imelda Staunton also earned nominations for their impressive work in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Gone Girl and Pride respectively. A complete list of nominees can be found here.

Though a British organization, most of BAFTA’s awards are not limited to UK produced movies except for one – the Outstanding British Film category. Last year some of the nominees for this award had a tenuous claim to this distinction. In fact it was Gravity starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney that won this honor in 2014.

This year’s batch of outstanding movies are much more identifiably British and a good representation of UK filmmaking overall. Two are biopics of famous scholars, two are based on historical events set in the fairly recent past, one is a Scottish sci-fi thriller and the last is a CGI depiction of a beloved British children’s character. I’ve actually seen four out of the six films on the list and, despite a few disagreements based on my own personal tastes, would concur with a majority of its candidates.

Let’s take a look at the nominees, shall we?

The highly anticipated biopic The Imitation Game – starring Benedict Cumberbatch as codebreaking genius Alan Turing – is set to open the London Film Festival with a gala screening this week. In honor of the film’s debut in England, a brand new trailer has been released, which focuses a bit more on the man behind the intellect that helped crack the Nazis’s Enigma code.

Two trailers for the film have already been released, both of which focus on the groundbreaking work done by Turing and his team at Bletchley Park. This newest clip focuses the team of mathematicians assembled to crack the most difficult code the world had ever seen and the machine that Turing created – considered the earliest computer – to help them do it. The trailer also highlights the growing stress Turing was under to crack Enigma as quickly as possible – as well as to keep the secrets of his personal life from those around him.

Cumberbatch is joined by an all-star supporting cast featuring Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Allen Leech, Charles Dance and more. And, quite frankly, it looks outstanding.