When you freefall for 7,000 feet it doesn't feel like you're falling: it feels like you're floating, a bit like scuba diving.
When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don't really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it's not fair that others aren't doing exactly what you're doing. I do have that.
I haven't done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you're most recently famed for, so I'm careful of not repeating myself.
Enjoy the journey of life and not just the endgame.
People's hands fascinate me. It's tempting to look at a businessman's left hand and see if there's an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there's a tan line and the skin is pressed down where's he's worked a ring off his finger.
I'm not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying 'Hi' is going to be even more difficult because they won't know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.
The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying.
'Frankenstein' was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That's a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order.
It does get strange when you realize people will hang around for hours to get a glimpse of you doing scenes outside.
My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.
The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.
I was thrilled with how the first series of 'Sherlock' was received. It was such great fun to film, which makes it so rewarding when something you enjoy is so well received.
Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.
Landing the role of Stephen Hawking was the most positively surprising thing that has happened to me.
If people ask, 'Are you Sherlock Holmes?', it's horribly naff, but I say, 'I'm not, I just look a bit like him' - which is how I feel. There are bad attributes of his that I really don't share!
The world of 'Sherlock Holmes' and the world that we live in now is big enough to take more than one interpretation.
When you see a good horseman, you're unable to tell where the instruction is coming from. It's like telepathy.
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.
Mystique is rare now, isn't it? There aren't that many enigmas in this modern world.
It's difficult because nothing's preordained by plan and you can't control it. That's one of those joys and thrills and nerve-racking realities of being an actor. A lot has to do with luck, no matter what your talent or contribution can be.
