Even in cerebral roles that are seemingly intelligent and nothing else, I think it’s so important to wrap your characterization in a physical form as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
![Benedict Cumberbatch Quote - I had to kiss it [ playing Hamlet] goodbye because Marvel have to plot things for the next three, four years.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/i-had-to-kiss-it-playing-hamlet-goodbye-because-ma.jpg)
![Benedict Cumberbatch Quote - I wanted to take the audience on a journey where that transition was funny and awkward. It’s the same cynicism that [Strange] has.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/i-wanted-to-take-the-audience-on-a-journey-where-t.jpg)
![Benedict Cumberbatch Quote - [Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/doctor-strange-gets-scraped-off-the-floor-and-then.jpg)
