“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 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.

[Doctor Strange] is a really rich character. It’s an easy thing to have a good old meal every day. It’s great. Yeah, I’m excited.