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

I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.

I had to kiss it [ playing Hamlet] goodbye because Marvel have to plot things for the next three, four years.

Doctors and nurses do crazy hours and keep an ideal afloat through the love and care that they have for their craft and their patients and the institution of the NHS. We should be very proud of it.

The biggest lesson Stephen Strange learns in this film is it’s not all about him.

There’s so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

There are other people who don’t mind shouting from the pulpit and being judged for it, and they do a hell of a lot of good – real, on-the-ground, life-changing good. So I think it can sometimes be a balancing act.

Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don’t know anyone on Earth who doesn’t, but I do find it funny.

If I’d had fame early on, I’d have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.

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.