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

It's very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.

I've done a bit of live action before but the fight sequences, the wire work and the physical regime were taken to another level [ in Doctor Strange].

Sometimes when you do fight scenes you think, "Oh, I'll be hit in the face," because people get carried away with their vanity and want to look too cool to care, but we were all really careful with each other.

It's always important to have the blessing.

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.

I never really got obsessed about one thing for long. I was a bit of a butterfly and a magpie.