Keira Knightly plays genius mathematician Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game, but her real-life math skills might be closer akin to the normal person’s skill set.

“We had a specialist brought in and I got that feeling that I haven’t had since school doing maths,” Keira Knightley explains.

She continues, “You sort of feel like you’ve died and I couldn’t concentrate at all. But he was such a nice man and it’s really interesting and I should have been paying attention but I didn’t!”

Knightley co-stars with Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, and from what he says, things weren’t much easier for him. However, Cumberbatch did say that the math was very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z0NRVYndvY

“I think there are hugely exciting things on a basic level that everyone can understand,” Cumberbatch, who plays opposite Keira Knightley as famed mathematician Alan Turing, said.

He explained, “Like the idea of coding, the idea of programming, the idea that what you use as language can be turned into something universal and can be used here, China, Russia, and those things excite me.”

Cumberbatch continued, “But the machine, the bomb, the reality of Bletchley Park, that was the moment that I thought right now this is very hard. I did understand a bit, a bit about the enigma machine and the coding but put an algorithm in front of me now, or a quadratic equation and this press conference would never end for me trying to work it out.”

Apparently, the group of actors playing the mathematicians on the movie grew anxious to prove that they did have some coding skills, but their efforts proved unsuccessful.

Keira Knightley said, “We had one day we all thought we should all be doing crosswords, so five of us got together with a quick crossword and it took us five days to finish it.”

Yep, that sounds closer to normalcy than intricate code breaking.

Congratulations to Keira Knightley on her enviable role in The Imitation Game!