Looking for happiness is a sure way to sadness, I think. You have to take each moment as it comes.

I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers. But I'm here to tell you I'm quite the opposite in real life. In fact I'm a f**king fantastic lover.

I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.

There's a huge raft of roles that actors in our culture perform, and you can see any one of about three Hamlets in a year. It's not something to be completely daunted by.

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.

I have memories of clouds whisking by while sitting in the pushchair on the roof of my parents' flat. I loved it! I just loved staring at the clouds and dreaming away.

I'm quite surprised by how many people grew up with this character [Doctor Strange ].