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.

There's no shame in stealing - any actor who says he doesn't is lying. You steal from everything.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

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.

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.

Being someone who is of our sensual reality, Stephen Strange has a lifestyle, he has a sexuality, he's materialistic.

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.