Tom Hiddleston Explains the Loki Timeline After Avengers: Endgame

After the God of Mischief meddles with time and breaks reality with a stolen Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, star Tom Hiddleston says Loki is "very confused and destabilized" when we see him next in the Marvel Studios original series. Arrested by Agent Michael M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and the Time Variance Authority and facing deletion from reality for his crimes against the sacred timeline that is the mainline Marvel Cinematic Universe, this "Variant Loki" will have to help Agent Mobius and the TVA fix what he's broken in the wake of his thwarted invasion of Earth in 2012's The Avengers.

"This Loki is the Loki who lost the Battle of New York at the end of the first Avengers film. This is the Loki who went through the story of that first Avengers film," Hiddleston explained to TV Insider. "He arrived on Earth, he had the Tesseract, he was captured by S.H.I.E.L.D. and imprisoned and had lots of interrogation by Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, and he invites an alien army to attack the city of Manhattan and is defeated by the assembled Avengers."

The puny god is then "smashed by the Hulk, rather like a ragdoll," Hiddleston recalled with a laugh. "So this is that Loki. He's been apprehended and is being taken from Stark Tower towards Central Park. But as you see in Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers from [2023] have gone back in time to 2012 to change things around."

That's when an angry Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) causes a distraction that allows Loki to get his hands on the dropped Tesseract, which he uses to open a portal and disappear through time and space. "Where he goes next," Hiddleston teased, "is where we start [in Loki]."

"I think what's really interesting is that the audience broadly has better perspective on Loki than Loki does," Hiddleston added. "Because the audience has seen the events of The Dark World, and Ragnarok, and Infinity War, and Endgame, and this is a Loki that doesn't have any of that self-awareness. He hasn't been on this arc of redemption and catharsis, and upon being apprehended by the TVA, he's a very confused and destabilized being. He's out of his comfort zone, a fish out of water, and not happy about it (laughs)."

Marvel's Loki premieres Wednesday, June 9, on Disney+.

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