So, in the end, instead of killing Sylvie to save time itself, Loki makes the ultimate sacrifice for the good of everyone else, and in doing so, he tasks himself with literally holding the fabric of existence together. And to me, that’s both a tragic and triumphant end. Why was this the right note to end the series on? I’m glad those are the two feelings, because that’s what we were going for. (Laughs.) I don’t know if I can answer that beyond what you just said; it’s just the right ending to the story. We always knew the show was going to end with Loki on a throne, even in season one, and it was never about where he was going. It was always about the feeling we wanted audiences to feel when he got there, and it was about building the story that led to that feeling. Ultimately, because I don’t want to get too into the weeds on the last ten minutes of the show, we all feel like the answers and the intentions are there on screen. But what I can say, generally, is that we are all really bored by the binary of hero-villain, good guy-bad guy, good choice-bad choice. In the real world, choices are really complicated. Real heroism often goes completely unrewarded. It often involves people who are making really tough decisions and will never benefit from the sacrifices that they’re having to make. And if you can build a superhero comic-book story that dives into the weeds of a more complicated heroism, then that was a challenge that was worth it to us to try. And Loki is the best character to do that with in many ways.
Technically, did Loki become the God of Stories, or a personified version of Yggdrasil, the Norse Tree of Life? Are those mutually exclusive? It all comes back to questions of free will. Is he writing stories, or is he allowing stories to continue to be told? Is he weaving them together? It’s an interpretation of what exactly he did there at the end, but I think both can potentially be true.
Of course, anything is possible within the comic book genre, but this finale feels like a send-off for Tom Hiddleston as this character. Do you think we’ve seen the last of Tom’s Loki for at least a long while? I think his approach to that performance certainly was [a send-off], and I think we all felt that on set. We wanted this to feel like a proper ending for our show, but that does not mean that there won’t be more Loki or stories within this world. We just wanted to give this a proper ending in a way that we often don’t get to do in the MCU. But also, in Marvel comics and the history of comics, the end of a comic run doesn’t mean the end of that character or those stories. And if there’s another story to be told or further stories to be told with what we’re doing here — and it’s with the right filmmakers and the right writers and the right team — then we would love to continue to see Tom. I also said this in season one, but I honestly think Tom will play Loki until he’s Richard E. Grant’s Classic Loki. It’s about the right thing and when we’re doing it, and being really careful about how we build those stories.
The TVA still has some unfinished business, as they have to track Kang variants. So will the TVA appear in the MCU again at some point? I would love to keep telling TVA stories. Internally, people pitch everything, and I’m actively like, “I want to do more TVA!” It will just end up being about where it makes sense for them to come in, in the future, but we all look at that corner of the MCU and go, “God, we’re just scratching the surface.”
We’ll see. It comes down to the speed at which we make streaming shows, and that’s natural for TV. That’s not a Marvel speed. You’re shooting a lot in small schedules, and it’s benefited by having sets and not having to do a ton of VFX in every shot. It makes good practical sense, and there’s a reason why people did it for a hundred years of moviemaking. It’s about when it makes sense for our stories, certainly, but we’re also telling comic book stories, and sometimes, things have to be more fantastical than what you can build. So it’s about being smart and how you do it. I love it, and I know our team loves it. When we were shooting Loki, we had a number of filmmakers who visited set, and their reactions were like, “They let you build all this?” And it’s like, “Yeah! Wait, you’re not? You should be doing this, too.” (Laughs.) dropdown share options Save Pin It So, long answer short, yeah, I think people have seen what we did and they see that it’s an option now, and will hopefully embrace it.
Fan theories can be both a blessing and a curse, as your friends on WandaVision know, but have you lost any sleep over not making the McDonald’s kid a young Mobius (Owen Wilson)? No, but I love that theory. I also saw that maybe Mobius is an Odin variant, and that was really imaginative and cool, too. So it was never discussed and I never lost sleep over it, although I read all that stuff and I love it. Partially why Loki feels more densely layered than some other projects is we know that people are looking at it in that way and are digging into everything. So everybody on the team really embraces that and goes, “If it’s in frame, it has to hold up the scrutiny.” We’re either subliminally hiding things in there, or we’re putting things in there to misdirect so that we can…
