Everything flat lines in my brain, to be honest. I don’t think much at all. I just sit there going, “Holy s**t!” It’s very rare that you stop to look… - Benedict Cumberbatch

I don’t know if watching your own work is a good or bad thing. I don’t know how much I learn from it. Each individual circumstance holds its own world of singularities and peculiarities. But among that, you can go: “Oh yeah, I remember that was what I tried to do.” Sometimes it doesn’t fit with the cast or the energy of the scene or the beat of another character. But to sit down in the audience and go: “Oh my God, I think that was what I intended”, was great.

There have enough people who been vilified in American politics to have American villains now, but it is a very American thing, to have British villains.

What I try to look for is something that a general audience can relate to, to have an investment in these extraordinary people who achieve extraordinary things. That’s an easy task for an actor, to humanize these incredible machines of ideas that some of these people are. It’s not always easy, but that’s the challenge, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed doing. I’m very lucky.