‘Loki’ Writer & Director on the ‘Massive Responsibility’ of Bringing the Trickster to Disney+

Tom Hiddleston is up to his usual tricks in the titular role of Disney+’s Loki, but Marvel is also welcoming some fresh faces to the series with writer Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron.

With their vision, Waldron and Herron bring the Time Variance Authority (TVA) to life. “We filmed them as one giant six-hour thing,” shares Herron. “So, it was great. I got to feed into scripts and characters and be part of that conversation. And I think for me it felt like a very creative experience”

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But “it was a massive responsibility,” she notes. She also revealed that they’re still working on finishing the episodes for the season. Waldron likewise sees the show as a fun challenge. “I was excited to just dig deeper into the character,” he says adding that, like Hiddleston, he was thrilled to “excavate a little bit more of who Loki is, why is he the way that he is, and make Loki himself do that self-reflection in a way that maybe he never has.”

The show follows the trickster on an emotional rollercoaster with some big moments on the horizon. “My intention was for every episode to be the best episode of the show,” Waldron teases, “and to continually surprise people and deliver on expectations.”

(Credit: Courtesy of Marvel Studios)

The power dynamics are totally shifted from what you normally see with Loki,” Waldron promises. “Loki is normally in control of every conversation.” But that’s about to change, with the addition of Owen Wilson‘s Mobius. “With Mobius, he’s the one in control. But yet, he’s the most patient anybody’s probably ever been with Loki, which in fact is actually driving Loki crazy because all Loki wants to do is get a rise out of you.”

As for Herron, she wanted to bring some life to this new MCU space of the TVA. “I really wanted to make sure we had a lot of practical sets just because I wanted this to feel like a real living, breathing space,” she shares. “I was inspired by films like Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind] and also Scott Pilgrim. They both have fantastical elements to them where you’ll see characters run from one spectacular place to another and it’s all in-camera.”

(Credit: Chuck Zlotnick. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved)

There are visual effects too, but the sets provide a strong world-building quality to this particular spot in the Marvel Universe. “Setting up the TVA to me was so exciting because there are these amazing images in the comics of these desks stretching off into infinity,” says Herron. “I hope that in other MCU stories, they’re going to go back there.”

When it comes to Marvel, anything is possible, but for Herron, real-world influences really helped shape the world and characters — especially Mobius. “Something that I was really excited about on the phone with [Wilson] is he was saying, ‘I really want to do something outside of myself.’ And he’d done like a kind of a skit on SNL where he’d had silver hair and he was like, ‘I was thinking of maybe having like silver hair.'”

(Credit: Chuck Zlotnick. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved)

Herron ran with this and looked to people in her own life to help create the character viewers see onscreen. “A few of my friends, including one of the editors on the show, has silver hair and there’s a director I know back home and I was using them as a reference.”

And Hiddleston and Wilson are having too much fun inside this world. “You just see little nuances that the actors are doing,” Herron says, “riffs and funny lines that Owen will throw in and then Tom, like a tennis match, will throw back to him.”

It’s a match you don’t want to miss.

Loki, Series Premiere, Wednesday, June 9, Disney+