Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes - Page 8

I don't wear a mask, I don't have a suit. It's not some CG double or a stunt double. The suffering the character [Doctor Strange ] goes through is immense!

An inflated sense of self-importance? Absolutely, but I think it comes from Doctor Strange need to control things and that's what happens to all surgeons, I think. There's a huge degree of uncertainty and bafflement.

There's another weight of us being in the public eye, which is this presumption that, because your work and your promotion work is very public, your private life should be, too.

It's very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set.

[Doctor Strange] gets scraped off the floor and then thrown right down to hell again and then slowly pulls himself back up.

I've done a bit of live action before but the fight sequences, the wire work and the physical regime were taken to another level [ in Doctor Strange].

Those are more universal things than some of the characters I play, who are slightly sociopathic. I keep reminding people I can do ordinary.

It's the same thing, I think, whether it's breathing or meditation or yoga. And running is a great way of doing it.

Doctors and nurses do crazy hours and keep an ideal afloat through the love and care that they have for their craft and their patients and the institution of the NHS. We should be very proud of it.

It will be obvious to anyone who sees it that he [Doctor Strange] earns that cloak. You think he's doing all right and then you realise that there's one massive lesson to learn.

I had to kiss it [ playing Hamlet] goodbye because Marvel have to plot things for the next three, four years.

I don't think I could form my writing into scripts or novels. It's so sporadic. My writing's pretty poor. I often think, "Who's this for?" Sometimes it's impressions of the day or my life, or it's fiction. Sometimes it's about things I want to remember, or I try to write in really awful French.

I realised quite early on that, although I wasn't trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.

New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I've always had dear friends here - family, actually, I would say.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.

Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.

It is a wonderful thing to get married young and become a father.

Sometimes during a conversation with a journalist - where you are answering things you never normally talk about, not even with some of your closest friends - you end up being quite confessional, and you don't think about the amplification of that. No matter how fancy these journalists are, they have editors or political leanings behind their publications, which means that, basically, they're going to shape what you've said into an article they've already written. So you have to be really careful with your words.

I wasn't born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.

One of the first roles I had on stage was with a brilliant director in a brilliant play with a brilliant cast, but I just couldn't find my way into the heart of the character. I found myself straining a lot. When it started. I felt lost. That was the Eugène Ionesco play Rhinoceros. I don't think I was prepared for that. I don't think I had the full tool kit to do it justice. It's a very difficult play, it's an extraordinarily difficult part, and I never felt I really got it right. Far from it. To a degree, Hamlet was the same.

The training gave me the building blocks to get through it. A production of that scale, in a theater that big, you are going to struggle to keep your voice at first-run perfectness. All that work I did - the pull-ups and pushups - helped keep my body fit. Hamlet, the show, is a cardiovascular workout of about three hours, never mind the mental, soul-crushing element of it.

Laughing and crying are really similar - what happens to your body. It's a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.

I'm always keen to use my body in my work, so I'm looking forward to the motion capture for Smaug. Both Gollum and King Kong were primates, whereas I'm playing a serpent, so it'll be interesting - I'll have to tie my legs together, possibly, or else they'll be kind of splayed out to the side as a reptile's should be.

I was brought up in a world of privilege.