While Avengers: Endgame (maybe) closed the book on the story arcs of Steve Rogers as Captain America, Black Widow, and Iron Man, viewers came away wondering where did Loki go after stealing the Tesseract? When Tom Hiddleston filmed those scenes back in 2017, he was wondering the same thing.
“Where’d he go? When does he go? How does he get there? These are all questions I remember asking on the day, and then not being given any answers,” Hiddleston said in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige admits that, at the time, Loki’s getaway was only meant to move the Endgame plot forward, and force Cap and Tony Stark to travel further back in time. One year later, Hiddleston was approached about making the Disney+ series.
“One of the things Kevin Feige led on was, ‘I think we should find a way of exploring the parts of Loki that are independent of his relationship with Thor,’ or see him in a duality or in relationship with others, which I thought was very exciting,” Hiddleston, who has played the God of Mischief for over a decade, appearing in three Thor films and three Avengers films, said. “So the Odinson saga, that trilogy of films, still has its integrity, and we don’t have to reopen it and retell it.”
The Loki series stars Owen Wilson as Agent Mobius for the Time Variance Authority, a bureaucratic organization tasked with safeguarding the proper flow of time, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Judge Renslayer. As the trailer suggests, the TVA captured this Loki Variant, and the organization is working with him to fix the timeline issues that he caused while on the run.
Feige had long wanted to find a way to include the TVA, but didn’t know how until Loki came around. Hiddleston was also intrigued about heading in this direction with the series, with an alternate version of his character who isn’t as fully realized as he was prior to his death at the hands of Thanos in Infinity War.
“[That] was very exciting because in the other films, there was always something about Loki that was very controlled,” Hiddleston explained. “He seemed to know exactly what the cards in his hand were and how he was going to play them…. And Loki versus the TVA is Loki out of control immediately, and in an environment in which he’s completely behind the pace, out of his comfort zone, destabilized, and acting out.”
Aside from saying that the show will jump around time and reality, Loki head writer Michael Waldron said, “Every episode, we tried to take inspiration from different things,” citing Blade Runner’s noir aesthetic as one example. “Part of the fun of the multiverse and playing with time is seeing other versions of characters, and other versions of the titular character in particular,” Feige added. Even though Feige mentions the word “multiverse,” he wouldn’t comment on whether Loki’s story will segue into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, or any other project.
Fans seem to be especially excited to see the on-screen dynamic between Wilson’s character Mobius and Hiddleston’s Loki. “Mobius is not unlike Owen Wilson in that he’s sort of nonplussed by the MCU,” Feige said. “[Loki] is used to getting a reaction out of people, whether it’s his brother or his father, or the other Avengers. He likes to be very flamboyant and theatrical. Mobius doesn’t give him the reaction he’s looking for. That leads to a very unique relationship that Loki’s not used to.”
Loki premieres on Disney+ on June 9.
