With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.
There’s an Iago and a Romeo within all of us. There is that lover, and there is that sociopath.
Do the work, enjoy the work, take it seriously, don't take yourself seriously and keep your head down!
I'm an actor, and part of my joy and my curiosity about the job that I do, is that actors have the privilege of exploring human nature in different ways.
For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
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.
I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.
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?'
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.
It's a rare thing when you can read a script in one sitting and you haven't looked at the watch or you've gone to make a cup of tea.
Since my education, I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.
n our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.
I learn the lines as soon as I can and then the challenge really, for filming, is to show up and be there and respond to what's around you. That's where the gold dust is. It's really strange, no amount of preparation will help you with the magic of spontaneity on the day [of filming].
In the end, you will always kneel.
I’d like to fight everybody who wants to make war on people. I’d like to fight bullies, actually. I’d like to stand up to the bullies in this world. I was actually mugged once in London, and I was completely defenseless. They came at me with a… I was held at knifepoint. And I felt so angry that I let them do it and I think I’d like to go back and say ‘Look, it’s okay’, and if they tried to stab me, I could just say ‘You can stop that now’.
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 think everyone should do what they love because it will never feel like work that way.
I personally feel that people feel very reassured by nature because it makes us feel small and that's a good thing for human beings and for society.
I think a healthy connection with the natural world actually makes us more human.
There are certain things in the scripts that need to be planned: you know, big stunt sequences, battle sequences... you can't improvise that stuff. You can improvise when there's just two of you standing in a kitchen and the most dramatic thing that's going to happen is someone's going to open the fridge.
Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
I had huge fun with Chris Evans, as Captain America, because super-soldier though he may be, he's still a man, up against a God who in his own mind is infinitely superior. Then, in the ring with The Hulk, we've got this silver tongued, lightening quick mind up against the embodiment of rage..Loki has this mercurial, transformative ability, not just physically but intellectually, so not all the fights are purely physical. Mind games? Maybe.
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.
I would always play the baddie, incidentally.
We pull on to the road, where our only company are the wandering cattle, who have become commonplace as traffic lights. Lethargic and listless, they look like they've been roaming the roads of Guinea since the dawn of time. And no doubt they will continue to long after we're gone.
