One of the first roles I had on stage was with a brilliant director in a brilliant play with a brilliant cast, but I just couldn't find my way into the heart of the character. I found myself straining a lot. When it started. I felt lost. That was the Eugène Ionesco play Rhinoceros. I don't think I was prepared for that. I don't think I had the full tool kit to do it justice. It's a very difficult play, it's an extraordinarily difficult part, and I never felt I really got it right. Far from it. To a degree, Hamlet was the same.

I play enough other mad people, as well and some sane people, to vary the palette of what's scrabbling around in my head and soul to bring to the floor, as a storyteller.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

Sometimes during a conversation with a journalist - where you are answering things you never normally talk about, not even with some of your closest friends - you end up being quite confessional, and you don't think about the amplification of that. No matter how fancy these journalists are, they have editors or political leanings behind their publications, which means that, basically, they're going to shape what you've said into an article they've already written. So you have to be really careful with your words.

I don't wear a mask, I don't have a suit. It's not some CG double or a stunt double. The suffering the character [Doctor Strange ] goes through is immense!

We look at science as the ultimate answer for everything yet we are really messy organisms and when the two collide in the upper echelons of medicine you think science will prevail but it's not always that way.

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