Everything’s a choice. Nobody’s born good. Nobody’s born evil. It’s always a choice.
It’s like playing tennis, you play a different rally with different people. Every actor is different and the chemistry between actors is different.
Fame is weird and amorphous and unpredictable.
People love escapism and there should be a place for it.
Out of 10 how enthusiastic a dancer am I? 11.
Tony Stark in ‘Iron Man’ helped wider audiences finally embrace the enormous talent of Robert Downey Jr.
I would always play the baddie, incidentally.
You can’t really legislate for the decisions that your heart makes.
The language of digital communication is a language we don’t understand in a way. People say the internet is like the Wild West in that it’s lawless and we haven’t worked out how to make it structured or moral.
I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.
Loki in ‘Thor’ is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I’d built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.
I’m an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.
I was so lucky because what I did in ‘Thor’ was I built the character from the ground up – the foundations of his spirit, really. He was someone who was born with an expectation that he would one day be a king, born with an entitlement.
I love the acting community at Cambridge. It’s really quite committed and serious, since the days of Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen right through to Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.
Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you’re playing a tender love story that’s set in a coffee shop or whether you’re in ‘The Avengers,’ which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.
I was informed yesterday that there’s a Twitter account for my laugh. Very hard to get used to things like that. Pretty amazing.
I’ve done my share of period stuff. I’m not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses.
It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don’t have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.
It is so rare as an actor to be allowed the chance to revisit a role and to go back to a character that you already built, and lived inside, and understood. To take it further to another stage is a huge privilege.
I never get afraid of things, I only get excited.