Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.

I am very flattered. I have also become a verb as in "I have cumberbatched the UK audience" apparently. Who knows, by the end of the year I might become a swear word too! It's crazy and fun and very flattering.

Mystique is rare now, isn't it? There aren't that many enigmas in this modern world.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

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.

If you can't fail, you can never get better.

[While voicing cartoons] you have to lose your sanity and inhibitions and any kind of dignity and just throw yourself around a bit.