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

If you can’t jump on board when the ride’s going past that’s it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

People’s hands fascinate me. It’s tempting to look at a businessman’s left hand and see if there’s an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there’s a tan line and the skin is pressed down where’s he’s worked a ring off his finger.

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?

To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.

I have three older brothers, and each one of them has chosen one of my parents’ education. Two of them are actors, and the third is a doctor as my mother is.

As doctors, we are not trained to communicate and understand the power of our words as they relate to a patient’s ability and desire to survive.

Yes. I’m a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.

I’ve never been front and centre as an iconic American character [like in Doctor Strange]. Day to day, you know you’re painting on a very big canvas.

The doctor that acts out of love doesn’t burn out. He or she may get tired physically, but not emotionally.

I’m a football coach. I’m not a doctor … They don’t call plays, I don’t do surgeries. We have a great deal here.

I know patients who bring a dozen roses to the doctor’s office. And, boy, the next visit, nobody forgets that. You come in and hey – ‘Here’s the lady who brought the roses’ vs. ‘Here’s the lung cancer.’