Quotes

Showing young children in these communities, that there are outlets for their feelings, that there is room in a space for their stories to be told, and that they will be applauded-and it's not about ego, it's about connection: that their pain is everybody else's pain.

Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don't be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you've had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. 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 am very proud of my work for the BBC, but I never wanted to stay stuck in the past. Loki has set me free from a particular casting type. But the work is the same. Rigor, discipline, humility, punctuality, above all: truthfulness. [CNN.com, 9 May 2012]

[on working on War Horse (2011) and Midnight in Paris (2011)] I'm enormously proud of it because I'm a significant part of both those films.

[on being directed by Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen for their Oscar-nominated movies] It was a massive honor to work with Woody and Steven.

I'm so moved and humbled by [the fans] responses to The Hollow Crown (2012) and Henry IV. I've never worked harder on anything in my life. It means the world.

[on being a part of a movement of young and interesting British actors] If I'm a part of it, I'm flattered. It's interesting, because I used to look up for inspiration, like every actor does, to people like Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh... Now I look sideways. I worked with Benedict Cumberbatch on War Horse (2011), then he went off to do Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). He was so good. I was so proud to call him my friend - it's one of the most electrifying performances by an actor this year. Tom Hardy - he's doing things that I think no British actor has ever done. His performance in Warrior (2011) was visceral, pure and muscular, and it made me cry. Michael Fassbender has had an annus mirabilis with A Dangerous Method (2011) and his studio breakthrough in X-Men: First Class (2011), where, hands down, he and James McAvoy were the best things in it.

To have compassion for a character is no different from having compassion for another human being.

I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, or afraid of showing that they care because it's uncool. It's uncool to have passion. It's so much easier to lose when you've shown everyone how much you don't care if you win or lose. It's much harder to lose when you show that you care, but, you'll never win, unless you also stand to lose. Don't be afraid of your passion.

[on coping with the end of a long shoot] You get used to it - you have to - otherwise you'd spend your life being heartbroken. But it never stops being sad because for that short time you become a family. You do, you see the same people every day for sixteen hours a day, for months on end, and you're so bound together by your common purpose, which is to make a great film.

I get asked to play a lot of complex people, which is great because I think that people are complex, much more so than any of us are really willing to let on. There is an enormous pressure to conform to what's conventional now, and I think people are quite afraid of individuality, actually.

[on shooting Thor: The Dark World (2013) in Iceland] Iceland is one of the few places on earth that looks like another world because the landscape is so extraordinary. The dimensions are bigger, the proportions are bigger, a big hill is absolutely enormous, and the colour of the water has a translucency that I've never seen before. The sky seems twice the size, and some of it looks like a moonscape to me... You still walk down the street in Reykjavik and run into five people who are called Thor. To be on the land that invented this mythology was extraordinary.

[on portraying Loki, the legendary Nordic god of mischief] The key thing about any character I play is I have to start from a place of compassion. My stepping into the silhouette comes from attempting to understand his point-of-view. So even though he is and has been regarded as villain, antagonist, antihero, in my mind - as I play him - I have to fight in his corner. Having said that, from an objective intellectual standpoint, Loki is a deeply mixed-up cat.

[observation, 2014] All the greatest actors allow themselves to grow. I don't know which way the wind will blow for me, but I know that I'm along for the ride.

[PopcornTaxi, 10/8/2013] I suppose if I have one fear in my life, it's a fear of wasting time. And um, I don't want to look back at my life and think "God, I wish I had done all of this stuff.. that I always wanted to do-- but I didn't do it because I was afraid, or because someone was gonna take a pot shot at me, or because I might fail." Or, um--that's, to me, that is the greatest tragedy: is to look back and say "I wish I had, and I didn't." Em, and I think, at a certain time, I just refused to let that be a factor in anything.

[on being a fan of Michael Haneke's Amour] That film is like a mountain. It's a piece of wisdom that is in the background every day and Haneke has just shown it, saying, "So you know, this is what you want. This is the intimacy that you'll be lucky to have when you get to the end of your life..." When I saw it, I couldn't stop thinking about that film for an entire month. It just made everything else seem so flippant and disposable. It is really truly a perfect movie.

My experience is that camera has an extraordinary truthfulness and you can't lie in front of it. Terence Davies, the director, said to me once, "The camera captures the truth, but it also captures falsity. So if you don't feel it, don't do it.".

The reason I became an actor is because I sat in the audience of... you know... in cinema audience, and also in the theater, and... I love it when you go to see something, and you enter as an individual and you leave as a group, because you all been bound together by the same experience.

[on the challenge of wrestling with language in Shakespeare] Yes, there's a rigour to it. But it's all about readiness. If you have done the work, then it's easier. If it's in your hard drive then you're away. I compare it to Happy Birthday. If I asked you to recite that, you wouldn't have to think about it. It's just inside you. If I asked you to sing it a different way, you wouldn't have to think. That's my approach to Shakespeare: know it that well.