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.
The best comedy is always played straight down the middle.
I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.
With any role, you’re extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.
Within us there is the capacity of being anyone or anything.
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.