Convoluted ‘Loki’ spans centuries
as a cunning trickster here. Maybe it’s time for a little selfexamination.
“What I love about the series is that Loki is stripped of everything that’s familiar to him,” Hiddleston said during a video news conference on Monday, June 7. “Thor is not close by, Asgard (the planet of the Norse gods where Loki grew up) seems some distance away, the Avengers for the time being aren’t in sight. He’s stripped of his status and his power. If you take away all of those things Loki has used to identify himself over the last six movies, what remains? Who is he? Is he capable of growth? Is he capable of change? Those questions became really fascinating for all of us to ask.”
And there aren’t just questions to ask about Loki. Longtime fans of the comic books know that the Renslayer character goes all the way back to the 1960s, when she was an antagonist of Marvel’s original timetraveling villain, Kang the Conqueror. She got into some dark stuff over the ensuing decades that may or may not emerge in MbathaRaw’s portrayal of the seemingly righteous judge.
“I can’t really say in terms of how it relates to the comics,” the English actress noted during a video interview from Vancouver, British Columbia. “Some of what we’re doing with Ravonna is an origin story. But I do think the idea of ‘is somebody a villain or not’ is interesting, and that’s the thing with Loki as well. He is sort of an antihero. I don’t think anybody is 100% good or bad. That’s true when it comes to Renslayer too; she has some difficult choices to make.”
Mosaku, like Hiddleston and MbathaRaw (all Royal Academy of Dramatic Art alums), echoes her colleague’s assessment of the deeper themes that run beneath the bonecrunching action and equally gymnastic verbal humor/ efforts to explain what the heck is going on.
“There are some big topics in ‘Loki,’ ” the Nigeriaborn, Manchesterraised actress said by video from Toronto. “In its six hours, it explores what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, who is a hero and who is a villain, free will and destiny.”
What about life and death?
“Well, a version of Loki certainly died in ‘Infinity War,’ ” conceded Waldron, whose script for the upcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” movie just may not be a model of existential clarity, either. “This is a different version of Loki who, after the events of the first ‘Avengers’ movie and ‘Endgame,’ grabbed that Tesseract and disappeared. But rest assured, Loki still gets killed by Thanos.”
That’s some kind of reassurance they’ve got in Marvel’s mad Multiverse.