Tom Hiddleston

“Every villian is a hero in his own mind.”

“Tony Stark in 'Iron Man' helped wider audiences finally embrace the enormous talent of Robert Downey Jr.”

“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.”

“Every villain is a hero in his own mind.”

“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.”

“I don't think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return.”

“Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.”

“Never, ever, let anyone tell you what you can and can't do. Prove the cynics wrong. Pity them for they have no imagination. The sky's the limit. Your sky. Your limit. Now. Let's dance.”

“I'd love to see T'he Avengers' with Robert Downey, Jr. playing Loki and Clark Gregg playing 'Thor' and I play Captain America.”

“Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.”

“Heath Ledger's performance in 'The Dark Knight' quite simply changed the game. He raised the bar not just for actors in superhero films, but young actors everywhere; for me. His performance was dark, anarchic, dizzying, free, and totally, thrillingly, dangerous.”

“Stay hungry, stay young, stay foolish, stay curious, and above all, stay humble because just when you think you got all the answers, is the moment when some bitter twist of fate in the universe will remind you that you very much don't.”

“I never like to make plans. It's nice to just hang.”

“Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.”

“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?'”

“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.”

“Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.”

“You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.”

“It's like playing tennis, you play a different rally with different people. Every actor is different and the chemistry between actors is different.”

“With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.”