I am an optimist... I choose to be. There is a lot of darkness in our world, there is a lot of pain and you can choose to see that or you can choose to see the joy. If you try to respond positively to the world, you will spend your time better.

The thing about playing gods, whether you're playing Thor and Loki or Greco Roman gods or Indian gods or characters in any mythology, the reason that gods were invented was because they were basically larger versions of ourselves.

Sometimes love really is just that simple.

As a citizen, you have a duty to ask what is true and what is false.

We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize that we only have one

My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He's from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, 'You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You've been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?'

Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Batman; Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.