Living la vida Loki with a step up To Marvel’s big league
Anyone doubting rising star director Kate Herron’s credentials to be in charge of Marvel’s latest foray into television, Loki, would do well to remember the time she tried to turn her Barbie doll into a superhero. It didn’t end well.
“The first thing that made me fall in love with Marvel was the X-men cartoon,” Herron says. “I used to watch that when I was a kid and I remember turning one of my Barbies into
Storm and trying to bleach her hair and it melted off.”
Herron’s background has mostly been in comedy to date, having directed four episodes of the Netflix hit Sex Education, but she says she wasn’t daunted by the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and taking charge of Tom Hiddleston’s character that audiences have loved to hate in three Thor films and two Avengers films.
She knew the competition would be fierce to land such a coveted gig over “big dog directors”, but decided that if she wasn’t going to be the most experienced contender, she would be the most passionate and assembled a 60-page booklet outlining her plans and the world she wanted to create. “I was just excited,” she says. “I think as a young filmmaker you just want to be given the opportunity to show that you can do that and I had an amazing team around me and I just felt that we all prepared a lot and I was really excited to show people that I could direct at that level.”
Hiddleston, who has played Loki opposite Chris Hemsworth’s God Of Thunder since the first Thor film in 2011, was key to the pitch and Herron took full advantage of his acting range and encyclopaedic knowledge of the character to come up with a “crime-thriller mixed with epic adventure”.
“It’s such a gift as a director to work with an actor that has been playing a character for over
a decade,” Herron says. “I actually asked him at the beginning of pre-production to do a
Loki lecture for our cast and crew. It was like a TED talk and we got clips from across the films and I just said to him ‘talk about your experience over the last 10 years over the MCU and Loki’s journey’.”
Keen-eyed Marvel fans will recall that Loki died at the hands of uber-villain Thanos at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, but that an alternative version of the character escaped during the “time heist” of Avengers: Endgame. It’s the earlier, unreconstructed version of the character that audiences will meet in Loki, arrested by a shadowy organisation called the Time Variance Authority for crimes against the sacred timeline and forced by Owen Wilson’s Mobius M. Mobius to restore the correct sequence of events.
“For me, it was exciting to take that version of Loki and put him into this fish out of water environment and have to work with this bureaucracy,” says Herron, who drew from her experience as an office drone before she made it as a writer.
“… I was excited to bring the spirit of that experience to it: coffee stains on paperwork, passive-aggressive post inspectors, keeping your desk tidy – things that people in offices will be like ‘oh, that’s a little bit familiar to me’ but then bring it into this amazing sci-fi world.” Loki is now streaming on Disney+