“[ Stephen Strange] is less strange than other characters I’ve played. He’s lost the power to love, which doesn’t make him a nasty person. I just think he’s closed-off.”

I wanted to take the audience on a journey where that transition was funny and awkward. It’s the same cynicism that [Strange] has.

I’ve realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.

You let things run in order to have some sanity and be able to do your work and not feel pre-judged.

I’ve been reading the books. It’s the origination, it’s the primary source. You should always go back to the books.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing – not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

I’m not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying ‘Hi’ is going to be even more difficult because they won’t know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

[Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.

I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own – they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.

It’s difficult because nothing’s preordained by plan and you can’t control it. That’s one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.

It’s very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.

I think it’s fair to say that, yeah, I’m playing Doctor Strange, I get there.

I don’t want to miss things.

The armoury of having any academic education does not necessarily set you up for being a good or better actor.

I remember very clearly someone saying, ‘Don’t shake hands with the cactus,’ and I thought, ‘Well, why not? What could possibly go wrong?’ Shaking hands is a friendly gesture.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don’t really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it’s not fair that others aren’t doing exactly what you’re doing. I do have that.

Someone will always hate what I say. There’s always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

What I hate is nasty, ugly people.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

You don’t hear me lambasting, engaging in personal attacks, getting nasty. I don’t think that belongs in politics.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

I came to The United States to see what would happen in 2000 after working for 20 years in Australia and asked my agent to look out for the nasty roles because I’d become famous for playing the nicest man in Australia.

Act averse to nasty language and partial to fruity tea.

Be as nice as possible and as nasty as necessary.

Theres heaven in the sweet by and by but there is to be victory in the nasty now and now.