“I was informed yesterday that there's a Twitter account for my laugh. Very hard to get used to things like that. Pretty amazing.”

“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.”

“Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman' Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.”

“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.”

“I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'”

“Haters never win. I just think that's true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end.”

“I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.”