Prince of Asgard, Odinson, the rightful King of Jotunheim, God of Mischief, and now leading man: Tom Hiddleston talks playing Loki outside of the relationship with his adoptive brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) in his own Marvel Studios series. The sons of Odin are enemies in Thor and The Avengers and uneasy allies in Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok, but the God of Thunder mourns for his mischievous brother when he’s killed by Thanos (Josh Brolin) in Avengers: Infinity War. When the God of Mischief returns in Loki as a time-traveling Variant from the year 2012 after escaping with a stolen Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, it’s as a Loki who missed out on all that brotherly bonding.
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“There was always, initially in those early stories in the MCU, there was this duality between Thor and Loki and Loki and Thor, and Chris and I had defined these characters together in opposition,” Hiddleston told MTV News. “I suppose Loki was always defined by his relationship to Thor and kind of vice versa. … One of the things that I was excited by [in Loki] was actually in any drama, if you strip or take away from a character the things that are familiar, then something has to be revealed about what remains. So if you take Loki away from Thor, away from Asgard, away from all the things that he’s used to being around — what makes Loki, Loki?”
“In the ten years of playing this character, or the six movies across ten years, in my preparation and research, I’ve always found this extraordinary range and complexity, that he has this massive history,” Hiddleston continued. “He has all these different, multitudinous facets and contradictory characteristics, and suddenly this is an opportunity to explore some of that in a new environment, which would then reveal — probably to me, and I hope to the audience — new things about him.”
Hiddleston says the brothers won’t reunite on the big screen in Thor: Love and Thunder, out in theaters in May 2022, but the Marvel co-stars did keep in touch during the making of Loki.
“I thought of [Hemsworth] while I was making this, and we emailed a bit,” Hiddleston said. “What’s really interesting is that Thor and Loki were on parallel tracks, and now they’re in completely different places. They would look across the void with some surprise, I think.”
Starring Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Sophia Di Martino, and Richard E. Grant, new episodes of Marvel’s Loki premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.
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