“It’s an interesting arc. You start with a character [Doctor Strange] who’s likeable and charming but very arrogant and distant. He’s funny but you can see there are massive holes in his life. It’s a very painful transition and all that he becomes is tested so quickly and violently.”

I can’t stop traffic on Fifth Avenue, not unless I walk in front of an oncoming cab.

I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It’s more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor.

I’d love to do a noir. I think Steve McQueen is so cool. But a classic film is a classic film, and perhaps the fantasy of being those characters should be left alone. You’re treading on very thin ice.

I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition.

I have pitfalls. I have emotional responses to things that are really not about me. They’re about other people.

There’s no shame in stealing – any actor who says he doesn’t is lying. You steal from everything.

Scott Derrickson breathes humour into a character with a very strong identity in the ’60s and ’70s, that psychedelia era of Eastern mysticism meeting the West.

I love doing impersonations of people.

Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don’t see beyond that.

I thought, well, why am I giving up on my primary dream to work doubly hard, to do something as an alternative to what it really still want to?

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

Doctor Strange is selfish but he’s still saving lives.

First of all, when you have a doctor who cut the leg to prevent the patient from the gangrene if you have to, we don’t call butcher ; you call him a doctor, and thank you for saving the lives.

…don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that.

Think of the war against terrorism. In my view, Washington’s approach can be compared to a doctor constantly banging away at a tumor instead of removing it surgically.

What I saw day-to-day is like people who are actually asking for freedom, calling for freedom – protesting, singing, chanting, calling for the removal of the regime – plain and simple.

A wealthy doctor who can help a poor man, and will not without a fee, has less sense of humanity than a poor ruffian, who kills a rich man to supply his necessities.

People have a tendency to cast me more as lawyers and doctors and just rich guys, rich assholes basically, a lot of rich assholes. That’s what I’m normally seen as, you know.

We have the greatest hospitals, doctors, and medical technology in the world – we need to make them accessible to every American.

A pregnant woman facing the most dire circumstances must be able to count on her doctor to do what is medically necessary to protect her from serious physical harm.