“My hair used to be real long, and my parents were encouraged when I cut it. They thought I was going ‘straight,’ but I was just getting weirder – at least in their eyes. I was getting into the punk thing.”

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.

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.