Loki: Owen Wilson Reveals How He Prepared For His Marvel Role

Loki star Owen Wilson is opening up about how he prepared for his Marvel Cinematic Universe role as Mobius M. Mobius: According to Wilson, Marvel Comics weren’t so much his guiding light as Loki star Tom Hiddleston was. When asked if he read a bunch of comics to prepare for Loki, Wilson admitted that “No, I didn’t maybe I should have, but actually Tom Hiddleston kind of, who of course plays Loki. He kind of, or we kind of, you know, they were almost like the Loki lectures. And so he, for a couple days walked me through everything and the whole lore…”

In his longer answer to Sirius XM”s The Jess Cagle Show, Owen Wilson explained just how Tom Hiddleston caught him up on MCU ‘need to know’ events by showing him “clips from the other movies and how it all fed into this story.” According to Wilson, that was the only prep he needed, “Tom telling me about it, telling me about his character. And even in the way sometimes that he would describe his character, it was useful for me because my character Mobius in Loki is kind of interviewing him at some point. So it kind of worked doing it that way.”

Loki‘s trailer revealed the kind of character interaction that Wilson just described. Mobius M. Mobius is part of the “Time Variance Authority,” the policing body of the timestream, who is dealing with Loki’s new status as a temporal anomaly, following Avengers: Endgame‘s Time Heist sequence. Mobius seems to be the caseworker (so to speak) assigned to Loki’s case, and indeed it seems that a good part of the series will be Mobius and Loki doing some kind of interview/interrogation.

It’s possible that Wilson’s conversation scenes with Hiddleston will be the central “action” of Loki – with the wild, mystical heist story being told in flashback vignettes. If that’s the case, Wilson indeed took the right approach to the role: he doesn’t need to know so much Marvel history, as he does sharp repertoire and banter with Tom Hiddleston.

Here’s what Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige teased about Loki, during a recent Disney Investors Day event:

“The god of mischief will step out of his brother’s shadow and into his own series on Disney+ in May of next year,” Feige said at Investor Day. “The great Tom Hiddleston returns as Loki, and he’s joined in the series by Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku, and Richard E. Grant. As with our other shows coming to Disney+, we wanted to try something a little different. Explore a new genre for us at Marvel Studios. So, we’ve put Loki in the middle of his own crime thriller. If that sounds a little bit unusual, don’t worry, Loki is just as confused.”

Loki is set to premiere on Disney+ in May.