I've gone up two suit sizes. The character I'm playing, he's strong, I can say that much. I've changed my physique a bit, so that requires eating like a foie gras goose, well beyond your appetite. Providing I don't feel too ill, I then work out two hours a day with a phenomenal trainer. It's the L.A. way.

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.

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.

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 think with any characterization there's a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.

I was always performing, doing silly voices. The teachers realized I could go one of two ways: be creative or destructive.

I know that might sound perverse because I played Julian Assange but, honestly, I don't think it would be fair for me to judge the man. I realize that makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I was portraying him a certain way, but we were always open to the fact that this was an interpretation, not any kind of exact evidence of who the man was.