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

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.

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.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it.

Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.

I constantly find myself changing my mind all the time. One day, I want to do just acting and just that. One day I want to do music and just that.

I’m unconscious while I’m acting. I live the role and am not myself.

I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.

Acting is easier and smoother than singing – it’s less drama.

Comedy is acting out optimism.