Tom Hiddleston as Loki in Marvel Studios' LOKI, Season 2, exclusively on Disney . Photo by Gareth Gatrell. © 2023 MARVEL.
Well, lookie lookie, Loki’s back. And with Season 2 of his Disney+ television series, things are getting even weirder than ever.
At the end of last season, Loki (Tom Hiddlestone) journeyed to the End Of Time with his alternate universe 'variant' Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) to confront He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). There, they discovered that the Kang variant had created the TVA (that’s the Time Variance Authority) in order to keep the ‘Sacred Timeline’ safe from all the other malevolent Kang variants from destroying the Multiverse.
While Loki was on board with his reasoning, Sylvie wasn’t, and killed He Who Remains, thus opening up an entire Multiverse of worms that Loki and his TVA colleague Mobius (Owen Wilson) now has to mop up.
Now, with the deluge of Marvel TV shows in the past couple of years, it may come as a bit of a surprise to know that Loki is the first Disney+ Marvel series to actually get a second season, which is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
To be honest, the new team of Avengers was better at the other type of assembling.
During a virtual interview from the US, Loki executive producer Kevin Wright said that the plan for Marvel TV shows moving forward is now to have multiple seasons for each show.
“I think in the streaming space, the goal going forward is anything that we're making in streaming will have multiple seasons. It's what TV is supposed to be,” he said.
“When Loki and some of the other shows were first coming on, we were figuring out how we wanted this to work within our storytelling. Loki most naturally lent itself to further stories ... (Season One) felt like this new world that we were just scratching the surface on, and could dive deeper into. So it just felt natural that we could continue to build this out. ... as long as Tom wants to play him!
Thor may have his hammer, but Loki has his, er, stick.
Speaking of Hiddlestone, this year marks the 12th year since the 42-year-old British actor made his debut as Asgard's God Of Mischief in 2011’s Thor. Since then, he has gone on to star in five other MCU films, including being the lead villain in 2012’s The Avengers, before landing his own TV series in 2021.
However, the Loki he plays now is not the same one that was introduced in Thor – that variant of Loki was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, whereas the one in the Loki TV series never got that far – he managed to escape in the confusion caused by the Avengers’ time-travelling shenanigans in Avengers: Endgame, only to end up captured by the TVA in Season One.
Confused yet? Well, all you need to know is that this Loki is another variant of the original Loki and has a chance to develop in another direction (preferably one that does not involve getting killed by Thanos again).
“I think that the fun thing (about Loki) is that right now he's outside of time. He's in the TVA, and he's got his own little corner of the universe to explore," Wright says.
“And the exciting thing is, this is obviously a variant of Loki who is exploring a path that the core version of him never got to experience. And because of that, he's going through an emotional growth that could go further than the other Loki has been through already."
Have I told you about that time I was a red racing car with eyes on my windshield?
Wright doesn’t rule out a potential reunion between Loki and Thor, but reckons it would be very different Loki that does so.
“It would be really great for the sun to shine on him and Thor again at some point down the road. So much of this is about building a character who goes through some exciting growth; so maybe if one day we get to do that, it would feel substantial and meaningful."
While the chemistry between Hiddlestone and Wilson is as on point as it was in the first season, the addition of Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once star Ke Huay Quan as TVA tech guy O.B really adds a different dimension to the show, especially when all three of them are on screen.
The new clerk at the 7-11 was a little shy.
According to Wright, there wasn’t as much improvising as you would think, as a lot of the ‘improv’ came during certain ‘story sessions’ they did in prep while in London getting ready to shoot.
“We would get all the cast in a room, put the scripts up on the screen, and everybody would kind of get to speak to their character,” he recalled. “They weren’t table reads, we were more like, ‘are we nailing this right? Are we really hitting this? Are we missing things?’”
“And a lot of improvising would come out of those sessions, that then the writers would fold into the script. Owen is an Academy nominated screenwriter himself, Rafael Casal, who plays X5, is a showrunner of his own (Blindspotting).
"So we had all these really great brains in the room, and I think that's why that stuff gets so tight, because when the cast gets to the set, they knew what the scene was and how we got there; and it let them just play, build and explore.”
Hey guy, you want to see my Oscar?
Wright has also mentioned in previous interviews that they wanted to make Season Two weirder than Season One, and promises that it will be.
"The weirdness does come in ... that’s a Loki tradition now! It felt like we were taking risks in Season One, and we didn't know that the audience was going to embrace them, but they did," he said.
"So as filmmakers, it felt like the mandate of audiences like that – maybe that’s what they are responding to with these characters, so let's continue to go to unexpected, strange places. It's a multiverse, so you want to be able to explore strange corners of it and weird possibilities!"
Episode 1 of Loki Season 2 is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar with new episodes every Friday
