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.
Make sure you tell the people you love that you love them. Loudly and often. You never know when it might be too late.
Thor and Loki are defined by each other.
I never like to make plans. It’s nice to just hang.
I wonder what the world would be like if everybody walked their talk; if word was married with deed; promises delivered by action.
If the Loki in ‘Thor’ was about a spiritual confusion – ‘Who am I? How do I belong in this world?’ – the Loki in ‘Avengers’ is, ‘I know exactly who I am, and I’m going to make this world belong to me.’
If you play it straight it’s funny – the best comedy is always played straight down the middle. The adjustment is understanding from the screenplay that a moment is hilarious.
At Christmas, individuals are apportioned their roles in the family script – you’re either the funny one or the sensitive one; or you either do the cooking or the washing up. And those roles aren’t easy to change.
I’m not a big fan of the class system, to be honest. It feels ugly to me. If you’ve got something to say and the work is good, it doesn’t matter where you come from.
Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don’t know about categorizing them in terms of class; I’m a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.
I am desperate to do a comedy now.
Quite often, most of us are defined first by our vital statistics – our sex, our height, our weight, the colour of our eyes and then we’re defined by our job.
If you look at all of the villains in the course of human history, they’ve all believed, delusionally, in the virtue of their actions – every villain is a hero in his own mind.
I think everyone should do what they love because it will never feel like work that way.
Acting takes a degree of mutual trust and respect.
The learning is the heavy lifting. You need to get the words into your brain.
Whenever I come back to London, which is home, I get that cosy, comfortable feeling of being home, as well as the sophistication of this city.
America and Europe are so different in the way they conceive of themselves and art and cinema.
I have been allowed to inhabit different shades of human nature and different colours of truth indifferent circumstances.
As an actor, it’s much, much easier to be really nasty to someone that you really like.
I suppose my understanding of villains is that they’re just people who are infected by all of the darker instincts – that they haven’t got the discipline to make the right choices.