“You’d have to be pretty hard-nosed not to feel some sympathy for the guy [Doctor Strange].”

[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.

I drag a lot of stuff round with me that I don’t need.

I try to work hard. I’m really proud of what I get to do as a living. I still pinch myself. But I also know it’s a craft, and I can get better at it and learn every time I do it. So I try to work hard no matter what the task is.

What makes a good animated movie is being able to balance adult and knowing in-jokes and also just out and out funny things that make all people laugh. The idea that it’s actually something that will appeal to a family, that’s the trick.

I’m aware of [Doctor Strange] place within the comic pantheon of it all, the Marvelverse, but I don’t email saying, “When are we doing next film?” I’m excited to see.

I don’t live beyond my means. I enjoy luxury and I enjoy the privilege of it, when I can afford it, and I’m in the situation where it’s been given to me, but I’m very conscious of what is wasteful.

I ate healthily, but there was no snacking, no drinking, no bread, no sugar, no smoking. Afterwards I had a pork belly roast.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.

I actually wanted to be a doctor. But doing all those horrid rat dissections made me faint. I studied science till the 12th standard and later took up commerce. I was planning to do chartered accountancy, but fate had something else in store for me.

There’s huge satisfaction in that, but I’ve got to credit all the doctors and trainers in Cleveland.

I told my wife I’m afraid to go back to the doctor because I’m afraid they’re going to look at you and say: ‘ma’am, just sell him for parts. It’s like that old car that as soon as you fix one thing, something else goes out on it.

You can’t be a doctor if you don’t know the entire parts of the body.

We would all be better off if our doctors took us aside, sat down next to us, and gave us this compassionate, yet universally true, warning,

As a matter of principle, we believe patients should be able to see the right doctor at the right time. As a matter of principle, we believe nothing should interfere with that doctor-patient relationship.

I think people are by-and-large happy with the providers that they have got now. They treasure that doctor-patient relationship.