Tom Hiddleston

“In 'Thor,' that was my own hair. I grew it out. But I have naturally curly, blonde hair, so I'll never look like that. By the time I got to 'The Avengers,' I had come off two other films, wh...”

“Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you're playing a tender love story that's set in a coffee shop or whether you're in 'The Avengers,' which is set in a Manhattan whi...”

“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 t...”

“If you are at a boys' school, especially, there is a level of bravado that you have to keep up otherwise you'll get picked on.”

“When people don't like themselves very much, they have to make up for it. The classic bully was actually a victim first.”

“I grew up watching 'Superman.' As a child, when I first learned to dive into a swimming pool, I wasn't diving, I was flying, like Superman. I used to dream of rescuing a girl I had a crush o...”

“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...”

“I love the acting community at Cambridge. It's really quite committed and serious, since the days of Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen right through to Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.”

“Chris Hemsworth is like Christopher Reeve in that he can do two things: he can wear a big red cape without a shred of self-consciousness. But he's also funny as hell, and he's so sweet. So w...”

“It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped o...”

“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...”

“It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good.”

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

“Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories...”

“Actors do tend to get pigeonholed. People want to know who you are so they can put you in a box. It's lovely to be known for such diametrically opposite roles.”

“In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares...”

“I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up...”

“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 woul...”

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

“You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.”