The training gave me the building blocks to get through it. A production of that scale, in a theater that big, you are going to struggle to keep your voice at first-run perfectness. All that work I did - the pull-ups and pushups - helped keep my body fit. Hamlet, the show, is a cardiovascular workout of about three hours, never mind the mental, soul-crushing element of it.

Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.

It's one of the things that attracted me to the role [Doctor Strange] is the fact that it's a really widely origin story, I mean this is part of it, but of course there's the whole chapter before where he's the neurosurgeon who has the accident. It's fantastic.

You let things run in order to have some sanity and be able to do your work and not feel pre-judged.

I ate healthily, but there was no snacking, no drinking, no bread, no sugar, no smoking. Afterwards I had a pork belly roast.

Only when Stephen Strange has his accident and everything that he's ever had in his life falls apart that he becomes pretty monstrous. It's the self-loathing rage of a wounded animal and he doesn't have a coping mechanism at all. It ties in with the discipline and the magic of this world.

Why this character [Doctor Strange] is being introduced, to open up the next chapter. A