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Benedict Cumberbatch will play Julian Paul Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is a large document leakage and analysis website that caused a stir in 2010 by publicly releasing over 92,000 classified U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The Julian Paul Assange that Cumberbatch will portray is the director and spokesperson of the website, having majored in physics and mathematics, and worked as a programmer and hacker. Assange himself, like the website, is highly controversial. He has received numerous honors for his work in leaking documents but has also been issued an arrest warrant by Interpol. In 2010, Assange was wanted forsuspectedrape and sexual assault of two women in Sweden. On December 7, 2010, he surrendered to London police and was immediately taken to Westminster Magistrates' Court for an extradition hearing, where his bail application was rejected. On August 16, 2012, Assange was granted political asylum by Ecuador.