“[Doctor Strange ] is slightly more specialised than Spider-Man or Superman or Batman, but he’s very loved by people who know him.”

An inflated sense of self-importance? Absolutely, but I think it comes from Doctor Strange need to control things and that’s what happens to all surgeons, I think. There’s a huge degree of uncertainty and bafflement.

I’m sad in a way that the character [Doctor Strange ] leaves [neurosurgery] behind. It’s an amazing discipline.

[Doctor Strange] is a really rich character. It’s an easy thing to have a good old meal every day. It’s great. Yeah, I’m excited.

The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It’s soul-destroying.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

Lines are very difficult to learn.

I am shortsighted. I need glasses for watching movies or concerts. It’s not a hipster affectation; I do have poor eyesight. This is how ridiculous my life is: I’ve had the test for contact lenses, but I haven’t found a half-day where I can go to the optician.

I don’t wear a mask, I don’t have a suit. It’s not some CG double or a stunt double. The suffering the character [Doctor Strange ] goes through is immense!

I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.

I struggle to learn by rote. I’ve had meltdowns on set. Which is embarrassing and shameful.

I’m always playing characters with intellects profoundly superior to mine. That’s great fun, even though it’s as much a fantasy for me as for the people watching me.

I was very keen to work on the script with Scott Derrickson and [C. Robert] Cargill, and working out the important story beats, changing lines, upping the comedy, changing the pace, all of that was great fun.

I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.

Laughing and crying are really similar – what happens to your body. It’s a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.

I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I’m here to tell you I’m quite the opposite in real life. In fact I’m a f**king fantastic lover.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a ‘desert rats’ tank operator in the Second World War.

That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, ‘We’ll have to take the eye out.’ …I fought like a tiger. I said, ‘No! Leave the eye alone.

There’s a heroic amount of effort that goes into making him [Doctor Strange] a superhero by the end of the film.

I wish medical schools helped us to analyze our healthy and unhealthy reasons for becoming doctors.

The birth control pill, to a great degree, made possible the (hetero)sexual revolution. Yet those who developed oral contraceptives did not intend their work to promote what the majority of Americans at the time called “promiscuity.”

There’s this old saying that, if you aren’t particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don’t want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don’t know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I’ve never regretted it.

I see people who die a few minutes after a doctor tells them there is no hope of a cure. They give up and go. Others get angry and find joy in proving the doctor wrong. Something within them is challenged and hopeful. Hope is the divine motivator.

Why this character [Doctor Strange] is being introduced, to open up the next chapter. A

I would love to see music reinstated as an essential part of schooling. The culture that it brings; the knowledge that it brings.