Thyme...
No, the other "Time."
Thank you. Much better.
Time...
For some, time is a wheel.
An infinite repetition of what came before and what is yet to come.
Looping endlessly over and over.
For others, time is an arrow.
Pressing faithfully forward.
We began Loki on February 10, 2020,
at eight o'clock in the morning
and wrapped production 299 days later.
Approximately 7,176 hours.
Or 430,560 minutes,
working and breathing and dreaming with the show.
Take that number and whittle it down with many clever edits,
and you get six episodes.
Totaling 280 minutes and 17 seconds of programming.
Now, whittle the experience down even further,
and you get this one-hour...
Give or take, documentary.
A comparatively brief time capsule.
A remembrance of things past.
Given the constraints, we shouldn't waste a single second.
Let's go back to the beginning.
At the end of the first day, I cannot believe that I'm doing this.
I literally cannot believe it's happening.
Um, I first wore this costume ten years ago.
I can't believe I'm still wearing it.
Um, and I'm so excited about this show.
Um, I'm so grateful to all of you for everything you're gonna do on it.
So, um, thank you for day one of 849.
And onward we march.
I remember going to see the first Iron Man in 2008.
And I was actually in Sweden, working on a project there with Kenneth Branagh.
And he went to see it the next weekend,
and we both thought, "God, Iron Man was extraordinary."
And then he got the job of directing Thor...
I kind of joked about, you know...
I think once we were on stage,
and I came in with an empty water cooler and pretended it was the hammer of Thor.
He was able to invite me to audition
'cause he knew that it was going to be a huge opportunity for so many people.
It's a long time since I've seen you smile.
I remember, as clear as day, the first auditions.
I almost remember the scenes. There was a scene between two brothers,
and they couldn't reveal the character names.
One was called Michael, the other was called Lucas.
I believe I learned both sets of lines.
So you're saying...
that our friends will stand with me in defending our home,
but my own brother will not?
And then a month later, Chris Hemsworth and I got the call on the same day.
Chris and I got together, and the moment I met him, I thought...
"This is the beginning of the most extraordinary journey.
"And I don't know where it's going to go, but I really like this person.
"This could be something."
From that point on, I just threw myself at it.
I threw my whole soul at it.
Tom is a fan favorite. People loved what he's brought to the character Loki.
He's a character that has always found a way to come back organically
in new, and interesting, and exciting ways.
Your savior is here!
As we were looking for the kind of stories we wanted to tell on Disney Plus,
Tom just seemed like a real no-brainer
because of the richness of that character and the depth of that fan base.
Something happened after Avengers One.
That's when I realized that Loki as a character
had taken on a life of its own in the mind of the audience.
So that by the time we got to Comic-Con in 2013,
Kevin Feige had this idea that I should go out on stage in character.
And I said to him, "That's insane and amazing.
"I'm in. Let's go."
It was a moment in time that is unrepeatable.
I don't think I'll ever have a moment like that ever again.
It was like stepping off...
Somehow out of the environment, into the world, as the character.
And hearing and feeling the energy in that room
was something I will never forget.
Say my name.
- Loki! - Say my name!
Loki!
And I think after that, it was, very generously,
that Kevin Feige, and Louis D'Esposito, and Victoria Alonso at Marvel thought,
"Well, Loki's got to hang around for a bit longer."
I, Loki, Prince of Asgard,
Odinson, rightful king of Jotunheim,
God of Mischief...
I remember meeting Joe and Anthony Russo.
And they said, "Infinity War is in...
"It's a labyrinthine thing, and everyone's involved.
"And we're trying to refine what happens in it.
"There are some things we're not sure of yet. However...
"we are sure that the opening of this film
"is Loki giving the Tesseract to Thanos."
You really are the worst brother.
"After which he is executed."
And I looked at Kevin, and I said...
"So, that's it?"
And he was like, "Yep."
No resurrections this time.
It's gonna be an extraordinary moment because...
Immediately, you believe in the power of Thanos.
That sacrifice meant something.
And we didn't wanna undo that sacrifice, or suggest that it never really happened,
or some other sort of way that felt like it might cheapen
the real emotional weight of that moment in that film.
We knew we wanted to tell more stories with Tom.
On my way down to coordinate search and rescue.
"On my way down to coordinate search and rescue."
I mean, honestly, how do you keep your food down...
Shut up.
As Endgame was coming together, the idea that,
throughout the time travel misadventures of the Avengers, something goes wrong...
No stairs!
Tom grabs the Cube and disappears.
It's a complication in that movie that really sets our heroes on their back foot.
What's interesting is, it's not dealt with.
We have no idea where that goes.
One of the things that Kevin Feige and myself were talking about was,
"Could that be a jumping-off point for a new way to tell a Loki story?"
Variant identified.
I beg your pardon?
TV has always been the medium of the anti-hero.
You think about the great anti-heroes like Don Draper or Tony Soprano.
There's enough time to kind of understand what some people might call
"the bad guy" in another movie or another type of story.
So we really wanted to have as much runway as possible
to explore kind of what makes Loki tick.
We did the math, and he's...
Loki's been on screen for less than two hours
over the course of ten years, and he's made this huge impact.
And suddenly now, we have six hours to tell this story.
That's better.
It's a serious show. It's a dramatic show.
It's a thrilling show. It's a really wacky show.
And it was just this amazing team of writers, led by Michael Waldron,
just trying to crack
the world and the logic of how this show works.
"The TVA manages all of time." What does that mean?
You know, I think a lot of people, what they expected was, like,
"This'll be Quantum Leap.
"This is gonna be Loki riding with Paul Revere,
"influencing historical events."
And my pitch from the first time I met with those guys is,
"Let's blow up what people think the show is."
How'd we do?
When we were looking for a director for this series,
we had a lot of interested parties, a lot of great conversations.
Kate really rose above all of them because of her take on the material.
I remember my agent telling me, basically,
"This is just, like, a friendly kind of meet-and-greet.
"Do not prepare a pitch."
I ignored that and I did, like, a full-on pitch.
She came in with this shock-and-awe pitch
that was the most amazing pitch that I had ever seen,
where it truly was the... What the show has become.
And I remember leaving that meeting
feeling like this is a person who understands the spirit
of what we would love to achieve with it.
And wasn't just going to execute those ideas,
but that was going to push them even further.
All at the same time, lift your weapons up towards these guys,
like, ready to fight.
I asked her, "What do you think, Kate, that the show is about?"
And she said, "I think it's about self-acceptance.
"You got a character who doesn't know how to change and grow.
"And we have this amazing story that's actually about
"coming to terms with who you are."
From that moment, I thought, "This woman knows what she's doing. She's in."
It was such a human, such a deep insight, so simply put.
I'm just a bit of a cheeseball, to be honest.
Like, I just... I love that it's about self-love
and, like, getting past your demons.
And I think something I always try and bring to everything I do is,
digging into the emotion and the truth of that,
and sort of letting the characters be ugly, in a way.
For me, it feels a bit more real.
Again, I think it's just, like, don't be scared to tread on each other a bit.
-Okay, okay, nice. Yeah. Right. Yeah. -'Cause it's like...
- As long as it's okay that we overlap. - Here we go. Picture up...
She has so many real-life experiences that she puts into the show.
She's worked in a lot of offices that sound a lot like the TVA,
so she would understand the buttons to push to drive Loki crazy.
The passage of time may be constant,
but the sensation of time is not.
An hour on the beach,
basking in the briny glow of utter freedom,
feels very different from an hour-long session in a dentist's chair.
And yet, a minute is a minute is a minute.
We move forward one minute at a time, one moment at a time...
Stop...
...whether we want to or not.
-And for that... -Stop it!
...we can thank our tireless friends at the Time Variance Authority.
There's an organization that goes back in the history of Marvel Comics
called the Time Variance Authority, the TVA.
It's an organization that I've long been fascinated with,
just as I've paged through comics at Marvel
in the years that I've been there.
And I always knew that they could have a very cool story to tell.
The notion of this bureaucracy
that basically controls all of time and space.
-Come on. -Let's go.
You're making a terrible mistake.
He's the trickster, and he's this prince of Asgard,
this God of Mischief, who's had this somewhat villainous role to play.
And we really just liked the idea of plucking him,
quite literally out of his own time
and throwing him down in a place where he doesn't know the rules.
You see him first in his Avengers costume.
And so, that's this, you know,
very elaborate sort of fighting outfit, right?
Absolutely not.
This is fine Asgardian leather.
So we wanted to just do a real stark contrast.
Just a very, like, open it up with a bang.
Now, hang on just a minute.
Two... one... Action!
We put him in a standard-issue TVA jumpsuit
and essentially, in that scene,
break him down to his most vulnerable core.
Please, through the door.
Oh, right. So the floor can drop out from under me as soon as I try to leave.
Nice try. I'm ready for it this time.
-That's not how this chamber works. -Liar.
You kind of wanted to give a little insight into the character
that wasn't just about the wall of the superhero costume, right?
You wanted to feel like
you were penetrating some layers into this character.
You have no idea what I'm capable of!
I... I think I might.
Have an idea of what he's capable of.
I remember sitting down with Kevin Wright, the producer,
and some of the writers,
and they were telling me the story of the show. And they were like,
"So, there's this really interesting character called Mobius and, um,
"he's kind of like an analyst in the TVA.
"And he's a great intellect, and he's a scholar.
"And he kind of understands Loki.
"And he's able to show him parts of himself
"he's never understood before."
And I always thought, "God, I wonder who's gonna play that part?"
-And here he is. -Here he is.
The one and only.
Let me ask you this. How...
Thought you were leading up to, like,
"And there's only one person in my mind..."
-There's only... -"...who could play this."
There's only one person.
-Instead it was, "Who is it gonna be?" -It was only ever...
"Here he is."
Well, when they first spoke to me about Iron Man,
I kind of wanted to let Marvel get established a little bit.
And so then when they talked to me about Thor, and then about...
uh, Captain America, and even Hulk,
I was like, "Well, you know, I don't know..."
So, um, it... I'm just kidding.
You know what's funny is, like, even the name "Mobius," it's like...
I just like that name.
-It just is a cool... -It's a great name. Yeah.
So when people say, "What are you doing?"
And, you know, "What are you doing in the Marvel Universe?"
"No, I'm not wearing a cape. I'm not... I don't have any superpowers.
"Other than the name 'Mobius,' which has a certain power to it."
In a story about anti-heroes,
the exciting thing about Mobius was to play a guy
who was really just kind of a down-the-middle, old-school hero.
Clock's always tickin'.
Which is better than the alternative.
He's the rascally detective.
And such a good foil for Tom.
How's training going?
-Complete natural. -Yeah?
Learning about my jet ski there?
It was great when I first got down here to work in Atlanta
because Tom... We sort of called them "The Loki Lectures"
that Tom would take us through and work with me individually.
Just going over the lore and everything that he felt was important,
and showing me clips and things.
So that was really important to me for understanding.
And then also, I ended up just sort of writing down
some of the stuff he said describing Loki.
And I think that even worked its way sometimes into dialogue that I would say.
Glorious purpose.
I remember Owen asking me what I loved about playing Loki.
Like, never mind what was great about the character,
what other people could see.
He was like, "Tom, what do you love about it?
"What do you love about Loki?"
And I heard myself saying,
"He plays all the keys on the piano.
"So, he plays the light keys and the major keys, all the...
"All the light, white notes up there.
"But he also plays the heavy keys with the left hand.
"Those deep, profound chords
"which are full of sorrow, and grief, and anger.
"And he's able to somehow make it...
"The music of Loki internally has this breadth of the scale."
Um, and Owen said, "That sounds about right."
Enough.
Back in your cage.
See, I can play the heavy keys, too.
I had a nice conversation one day where I was talking with Tom.
And he quoted something, and I said, "Is that Shakespeare?"
And he said, "Yes, Hamlet."
And I was proud just that I got the Shakespeare part.
And then I said, "Have you played Hamlet?"
And he said, yes, he had. That, in fact, Kenneth Branagh
directed him in some performances of Hamlet.
And he described what that was like and how rewarding it was,
and I was just listening.
And, um, when he finished, and this is, I guess, that sort of English politeness,
uh, there was a slight sort of pause.
And then he said, "Have you ever played Hamlet?"
Uh, and it's the first time, uh, that, uh...
That someone I've worked with
has ever even thought to ask me if that was a possibility.
Because I can't imagine Ben Stiller ever having wondered,
"God, has Owen ever played Hamlet?"
If you had to do a Shakespeare play...
what would you choose?
Two Gentlemen of Verona, I think.
Do you know it well?
Tom almost was able to keep a straight face.
-By heart. -That's when I felt like...
When he was asking the question, "Have you played Hamlet?"
That's, like... He was just, like...
Just being so polite about it.
-But... -You never know.
-You could've played it at school... -Yeah.
...in a school production.
-Yeah. What one could I... -You know most of it.
He knows most of Hamlet. People don't know that.
-You know it by heart. -No.
-That's not true. -You know some of it.
-As You Like It? -"Cease to persuade, loving Proteus.
"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wit."
That's the first line from Two Gentlemen of Verona, I think.
Which, I don't know the play,
but in college, I took a Shakespeare class.
Déjà vu. Yeah, time moves a little differently here in the TVA.
I think something that me and Owen spoke about at the very beginning was
he really wanted to, like, get out of himself.
And I think a key thing for that was the wig.
Obviously, we wanted to keep the moustache for Mobius
'cause that's so key to his character in the comics
and the artist that he's based on.
You gonna keep this? Or is this gonna stay in your life?
Well, I've gotten a lot of compliments on this moustache.
-It's very dashing, I think. -"Dashing" is the word that
a lot of people have used. So I might...
-I can't afford... -"Dapper."
"Dapper." I don't think
-I can afford to shave this. -"Smart." Yep.
-This might be from... -"Fancy."
From here on out when you see ol' OCW,
you might... see him with a mustache.
I really like the whole look.
And maybe it's a little bit sort of like that feeling as a kid
when you're kind of make believe.
Come on, gear up. There's been an attack.
Well, that's why I like this hat, because this feels a little bit like a...
A gumshoe from kind of the '40s,
which I feel like this "TVA" is a bit like.
I just wanted him to look completely like off-the-rack detective.
Almost as if he, you know, just found his clothing
through the lost and found at the TVA.
"Insubordinate, stubborn, unpredictable."
Sounds like someone else I know.
I was just thinking it sounds like someone I know.
We always had the Time-Keepers as kind of this big, omnipotent threat,
antagonistic force in the TVA.
But as we were writing the series,
we realized we probably need a more on-the-ground threat.
And that really took the form of Judge Renslayer.
You ridiculous bureaucrats will not dictate how my story ends!
It's not your story, Mr. Laufeyson. It never was.
Judge Renslayer, played with such poise, and authority, and power
by Gugu Mbatha-Raw,
is the TVA's Chief Justice.
Hey!
I loved the dimensions of Renslayer.
I felt like people who know the comics know who she is,
but she's never been interpreted before, you know.
So, there is a sense that you are really getting to create her.
And I just love the depths that she has and the layers that she has.
And I think that she's powerful.
She's well respected. She's worked her way up.
There's our Variant.
I don't think I've ever played such an authoritative character.
You know what would happen if we didn't prune the Timeline?
- What? - Chaos. Death.
Free will?
Only one person gets free will.
The one in charge.
We are here in my office...
Uh, Ravonna Renslayer, Judge Renslayer's office.
Uh, and this is... This is an incredible set.
And obviously we can't fully see right behind us,
but between the Time-Keepers right here,
um, there's an amazing view, um, of the whole of the TVA.
And it's really, um... It's really a powerful space.
I love it. And it's got that mid-century warmth to it.
I really feel like I've bonded with the space.
We all just knew we wanted to build sets.
The TVA just lent itself to a tactile, real, grounded feeling.
You wanted to see the rings of coffee on papers and desks.
And like, to do that, you just... You have to build the world.
For the record, this really does feel like a killing-me kind of a room.
You wanna have this kind of Big-Brother-is-watching vibe
with the TVA, that the Time-Keepers are always watching.
And it has this beautiful, big statues of the Time-Keepers,
'cause they are gods, essentially.
But I love the idea of marrying that with the Mad Men aesthetic,
because, you know, we think that they're good guys, and it's stylish.
Home sweet home.
I thought there was no magic here.
There isn't.
We talked a lot about fun sci-fi bureaucracies,
things like Defending Your Life, or Beetlejuice,
or Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
They've all been great touchstones for this massive organization
that feels kind of stuck in the past, in that it's very analog...
There's a lot of paper, a lot of older machines.
But also do this amazing, huge job of controlling all of time, basically.
Is this the greatest power in the universe?
Autumn, our director of photography, is doing an amazing job.
Painting with light and making things feel very cinematic,
very moody, and very cool.
Mischievous scamp.
The world that the production designers created
and kind of Kate's come up with is very unique for Loki,
and it has a lot of texture.
And I like to kind of bring that to the space
with lighting and lens choice.
And, you know, I want it to not be too sharp and too pristine,
so it feels like it could have been shot on 35.
And that's important to me,
and I think everyone was kind of on board with that.
Swinging for the fences!
The TVA is radically different
than what we've seen so far in the MCU.
It's heavily kind of influenced by mid-century Modernism and Brutalism,
with a strong dose of Kafka-esque humor mixed into it
and bureaucratic kind of chaos.
-Wish I could say I was surprised. -Yeah, I wish you hadn't interrupted us.
-Me? It's my fault? -Look, he can't have gotten very far.
Split up!
Some of the architecture and the design are circular.
I suppose it's the idea of how we think of time.
Time does exist in circles.
Clocks and watches are circular.
We talk of the years and the seasons.
We speak of seasonal cycles, and we think of time as a kind of...
it's something that rolls along.
Take a ticket.
In some ways, that is one of our simplest sets.
And yet it's a lot of people's favorite, and it's sort of the funniest.
The idea is that it's like a very oppressive,
compressed but trash compactor box.
Standing in this room now,
the ceiling is incredibly low, and there are all these lights.
It feels quite claustrophobic. And you just wanna get out.
The ceilings are 7'6''.
Even in a pretty humble apartment, you typically have 8-foot ceilings,
so there's six inches less headroom.
So it feels like it's kind of crushing down on you.
And then, obviously, as you know, the ceiling is covered
in this sea of illuminated circles of white, reflected light.
And inside of each circle,
there is a bulb that has a chrome tip at the bottom and shines light up.
And so, if you look at it, it looks like a sea of eyeballs, essentially.
And, you know, there's all the stanchions and the kind of nylon ropes
that are corralling them like cattle,
immediately stripping them of any kind of free will.
Thanks for visiting the TVA.
Don't hesitate to let us know how we're doin'.
We interestingly have a lot of hierarchy across the whole story.
Like the TVA, in its design, for example, you have Minutemen, Analysts, then Judges.
But that's reflected in the design of the TVA.
We have these kind of Shining Overlook-style corridors
that are endless and go on forever.
But we have the security level, and the management office level,
and then the level where Renslayer is.
And I think that that was really key as well,
was making it clear that the TVA, even in the design and the architecture,
had this kind of feeling of hierarchy.
We really worked hard to develop class systems in this show.
So we just created all this different ranking.
So basically, the Hunters have solid black uniforms.
All the Minutemen, all the sort of enlisted, have,
what I call the harlequin pattern,
where everybody's, from side to side, it's a contrasting panel,
and it switches around on each person.
So sometimes one panel is lighter on the right side.
On the other person, it's light on the left side.
On an another, it's light on the front.
So that it played with the concept of time and space.
If you see a Loki, prune it.
The bad Loki, preferably.
It is kind of meant to feel that this organization
sort of strips you of your individuality.
And the only things that I did do were scarring marks.
Like B-15 has the amount of kills she's scratched in numbers on her helmet.
She's a badass. She's proficient physically.
And, um, she's strong. She's dedicated and loyal.
Your Loki jumped me.
I told you he wasn't to be trusted.
When we were casting, Wunmi came in, and it was just like,
"This is it. This is the character."
We talked a lot about religion and faith.
And when people have crisis of faith or
like an epiphany or an awakening and everything changes.
I looked happy.
What now?
She brings this warmth to the character, but then she is our most badass.
Honestly, she's like an action hero, right?
It was such an exciting moment to be, like,
bring this really awesome woman to the MCU.
I really was excited about doing the stunts and doing all of that stuff
'cause I've never really done that stuff before.
A huge part of it was just being comfortable
with a weapon like the Time Stick,
where you turn it on, and you snap it open and twist it, and the light goes on.
It's orange when you want to prune something.
You almost hit me!
And then we have the TemPad, which,
it looks like a mobile phone, a gold mobile phone.
And you can call up a Time Door.
So that's what we'd use
to get to the new branch and back to the TVA.
The technology that they're using needs to feel like it's not,
it's not futuristic, but it's not archaic.
It needs to be this kind of ethereal place in time.
Because the way that it was written and described
in the script from the writers was that it was a glassy time door,
it instantly kind of started to all click into place.
Sir...
And one of the things that really inspired us
for the Time Doors was David Lynch's Dune,
when they're practice fighting,
and they have these kind of shields over them.
And we did a camera test shoot, and we shot an element.
And instantly I jumped into literally lookdeving this element out.
And we lookdeved out probably a good 150 different designs
before we landed on something that everyone really liked.
Fancy technology.
Threatening interrogation tactics.
Seems you and I are in a loop of our own.
Yeah, the Time Theater's where we really broke the back of this,
the early part of our shoot.
And there's such a huge and hugely important scene that takes place in it.
Do you enjoy hurting people?
It's a simple question.
Do you enjoy killing?
I'll kill you.
What, like you killed your mother?
He and Mobius in the Time Theater,
it's two people talking for 30 pages about identity
and philosophy, and life, and it's thrilling.
I can't believe you were D.B. Cooper.
I was young, and I lost a bet to Thor.
Obviously, when you're working on a Marvel production,
there's a lot of secrecy, right? So not everyone has a script.
And I remember filming on the Time Theater,
Owen and Tom are looking at a stage, but there's nothing on it.
So, the stage is paused on the Avengers on stage.
And then Loki gets up. He sets down the Time Disk.
Me and the editors have kind of cut together, like,
"Okay, we think this is a good moment to play, or this moment."
Let's go from the top of that clip, just so we get the timing on it.
All right. Let's reset. Let's shoot it.
There were points where the crew were like,
"Okay. This is two guys in a room, and they're looking at a wall.
"And Kate and Tom seem to have a groove for what's going on."
'Cause I'd say, "Now it's Dark World. Or now it's Avengers."
So, I've gone back to the same clip of Mum dying.
This is where the reaction goes on my own now.
What was really beautiful about it was that,
filming that, some of the crew were probably, like,
"Okay, this is very strange."
But they still threw their heart and souls into it.
And I think it was a real unifying moment for everyone.
And also, beyond that, just seeing Owen and Tom's chemistry on screen.
It was incredible.
And, like, it kind of began this chess match
that both those characters really play across the whole show.
A fugitive Variant's been killing our Minutemen.
And you need the God of Mischief to help you stop him?
That's right.
Why me?
The Variant we're hunting is...
you.
I beg your pardon?
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
And Loki is, by far, his own worst enemy.
In the 11 years of playing him, over six films,
spanning 13 hours and 50 minutes,
he has fought his brother and his father,
Frost Giants and Elves, Avengers and Titans.
But I can say with complete certainty
that Loki's biggest battle has always been within himself...
...until now.
If this show was about Loki learning to love himself,
a key way to help him arc and learn to overcome those things
is to have somebody that's gonna come in
and challenge those views in the first place.
This isn't about you.
Right.
Sophia plays a character in the comics
that was known as Sylvie Lushton. She was an apprentice of Loki's
and sort of someone that he groomed to be a great sorcerer.
Our version in the show is basically another version of Loki himself.
What are you doing?
-You trying to enchant me? -No.
-It won't work. -Why? Because you're a magician?
No, because my mind is too strong.
What really intrigued me about the story was that
this was a female variant of Loki who was a lot more in line
with The Enchantress character that we know from the comics,
but also, in a sense, a complete re-imagining of The Enchantress.
I thought there was something interesting in that.
Like, taking these two kind of identities of Loki
but doing something different.
-Keep it together. -It's gonna be fine.
She's another version of him in the unlimited universes
um, that are around. And there are many versions of Loki.
So her nexus event
pulled her away from her Loki life in Asgard,
and so she's been living a parallel life the whole time.
And it hasn't been great for Sylvie.
We still needed cues to her being a Loki.
But she needed to feel armored in a more lost-and-found sort of way as well.
Sort of as if she was picking up pieces along the way in her hideout.
It's as if Sylvie needed to feel
as though she was trying to recede into these worlds a little bit,
but also be badass, tough, and armored.
They've borrowed things from Loki.
Sort of the gold shape around the neck,
and the leather, and the cape.
The green circles on...
On the arms are... The green is for Loki, obviously.
And there's little bits of Enchantress there as well.
We really wanted it to be super practical.
Something that you can fight in and that Sylvie could be on the run in,
rather than high heels and a leotard.
Such a gift of a character.
I get to just be this absolute badass who's really angry,
and fight all of these guys.
Something that was really fun
in looking at Sylvie and her fighting style
and looking at these little differences between her,
you know, being a female version of Loki,
what makes her different?
And it's the nature and nurture.
Bam. Push down.
Loki grew up in a palace, and he's very balletic, the way he fights.
It's very graceful and very beautiful.
Whereas Sylvie, she's had to be on the run and live and grow up in an apocalypse.
So, I always think of her a bit like a feral cat, the way she fights.
You almost expect her to bite someone.
You see her at some point take off her horns
and put them in someone's face.
Whereas Loki, it's very, like, big arm movements.
Loki has this matador style of fighting,
where everything is about a kind of elegance and a kind of showmanship.
And fight!
We're actually trying to build on everything I've done,
but make it even more graceful, I suppose. If I can.
It's another mechanism for story. It's very cool.
Hey! There it is.
Once you take away all the action and spectacle,
our story is about identity
and someone finding their place in the world.
-You're not a serious man. -You're right. I'm a god.
You're a clown.
In Episode Three, in Shuroo,
this is a really big moment for Loki and Sylvie in their journey.
They're actually working as a team.
We have to get on that ark and make sure it takes off.
How?
We go around.
Loki and Sylvie have to run through this town,
and the stakes are very high.
And the scene has to have an enormous amount of momentum and propulsive energy.
And Kasra built a town.
He just built the town on the backlot.
Shuroo was a set and a set piece
that from the early days, we planted the flag and said,
"This is what it's going to be.
"And we want it to be big. We want it to be practical.
"They need to be able to run through this city.
"We have to build the city."
Shuroo, where we are now,
has some of the archetypical visual elements of a frontier town,
but has some elements that are completely different,
from what we've seen on Earth
and completely different from any other alien worlds
that have been established so far in the MCU.
The scenes are all at night, and you gotta check it out at night.
There's a lot of black light paint, so the finishes, as you see them now,
are quite different than where they actually end up being.
There's a quality where the architecture itself becomes light sources
because there's these elaborate, painted patterns
that are interactive with light on them.
And so, it's almost, like, floating, glowing patterns.
Do we trust each other?
We do and you can.
Good.
So, we walk up, we walk through this tunnel
and into the city of Shuroo. Follow me.
Ta-da!
Which is, I have to say,
the most amazing... One of the most amazing sets I have ever been on.
I mean, it's been... This has all been built on the backlot,
here in Atlanta at the studios.
Uh, it's all been lit and painted so that it glows in the dark.
Uh, it didn't exist before.
And even on a Marvel project,
I've never been on a set this size, I don't think.
The scene here is being shot as a oner.
And so what's required to do that
is essentially a set that is 360 degrees photographable.
So, every surface has to be designed, and built, and set decked.
Big part of it was not building any more set than we need.
It's really doing a lot of planning in the early phases.
Kate worked with previz and storyboards quite a lot
to figure out exactly how much we needed.
So that was a huge part to making sure the resources were utilized well.
Kate and I have probably been working on this for about a year
when we first met,
and started our prep in Los Angeles at Disney.
There are cuts in our sequence,
but we wanted the audience to feel like it's one shot.
So, we have stitches that transition us from one shot to the other.
But the way that we filmed them, we hide them
so that they feel seamless,
so you feel like it's one shot from start to finish.
I think it will be eight or nine sort of stitches in the oner.
But essentially, we come through this thing.
And behind me, you see...
In the show, you see this enormous crowd of people.
And at the very, very end of this street, up in the night sky,
is the docking point for this ark,
this ship that is potentially leaving.
And these meteors are crashing into the buildings,
and the buildings are falling down, and it's mayhem.
People are running and screaming,
and trying to get on the ark.
And there are guards who are trying to stop them.
So, to have the two of us, to have Loki and Sylvie,
myself and Sophia, have to get through this,
just creates an extraordinary, dynamic momentum.
And it's so exciting that at the moment that Loki and Sylvie actually connect,
that it finishes at the end of this extraordinary piece of action.
Do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki
is the fact that we're destined to lose?
No.
We may lose.
Sometimes painfully.
But we don't die.
One of the writers in our writers' room, Elissa Karasik,
she came in with a real strong POV
that it should run at that love-story thing.
And it was something the whole writers' room got behind from day one.
Not bad.
You know, it's so chaotic to fall in love with a version of yourself,
but at the same time, it's such a bad idea and so mischievous,
it's, like, of course Loki would fall in love with himself.
But he's also a character that,
I think, needs to, you know, get past his demons
and find the good within himself to be able to go on that redemptive journey.
So at the heart of it, it is this love story,
and you never fall in love at the right time.
The nice thing about it is that
Crater Lake is where these two characters really come together,
and they realize there's something deeper going on here.
You know, in life, we all go through struggles,
but we can't do it alone.
And if we have people we can trust,
it lightens the load, and it gladdens the heart.
And I think the relationship between Loki and Sylvie is about that connection.
That they learn, each of them, to care about the other.
What a incredible seismic narcissist.
You fell for yourself.
Her name was Sylvie.
Ah, Sylvie.
Lovely. How do you spell that? Is that with an I-E or just an I?
Is she alive?
For now.
People in love often speak of time stopping
when they first catch that jolting glance of their paramours,
as if our brain, perhaps even the universe, is telling us,
"Your life is forever changed."
"Sear this moment into your memory."
So much is forgotten and discarded every day.
A password, an acquaintance's name.
Our inability to control what stays and what goes
is a constant reminder of the fallibility of the human mind.
Objects in the rear view are often much smaller than they appear,
and they get smaller and smaller each day.
But as we march forever onward,
we will inevitably arrive at one of those defining moments
where clarity arrives, followed quickly by more uncertainty.
What we do in this moment can often define our lives
in ways we never dreamed of.
What is it?
Sylvie finally gets to the Time-Keepers.
And then she finds herself in a fight with Renslayer.
That was a really fun scene.
It's like, "Oh, wow! This woman can fight. Ah!"
"Sugar. Maybe I've met my match here."
This time I finish the job.
It's really the first time that we get to see them both together.
They have such different styles, I think,
because Renslayer came up from the military background as a Hunter,
and Sylvie really did have this street-wise fighting style.
The stunt team and the fight team are really careful as well
about making sure the fights make sense with the story.
And we make sure that the...
The scenes work as scenes without any fighting
and then, sort of add the fighting in.
I think it does make sense to go back.
-Yeah. -Even though it's less aggressive,
-but she's coming forward. -Yeah.
- Also... - Keep the counter step.
-It's a good counter step. -Yeah.
In a musical, you sing
when you don't have the words to express how you feel anymore.
When you get to that point, you start singing.
With this, it's like, when you don't have the words to express how you feel anymore,
we fight.
For Renslayer, it's kind of a fascinating arc to go from
this very, very sort of straight perception of the world that she has
to it sort of all crumbling before her eyes.
Did Judge Renslayer really feel betrayed by her beloved TVA?
Why don't you come back out and we can talk about it?
When I pitched The Void, my thought was it's meant to be
this barren wasteland where the TVA sends everyone, and it's rubbish.
It was so weird 'cause I was on set, obviously,
and we're in this countryside. And it's gray, and it's miserable.
And I was like, "Oh, my God. I've pitched England."
But it really did remind me of it.
It was quite strange. Quite a lot of our cast and crew are British.
We were like, "Yeah, we feel like we're home."
What I really wanted to feel in The Void was,
it's this place where it's like an overgrown garden.
We have all these weird structures. Like, we have a boat on land,
and you see all these kind of strange things that have been deleted
that shouldn't exist in time.
We had a lot of fun with Easter eggs
and sprinkling in stuff that shouldn't be there.
There's meant to be this kind of sadness
and this kind of lack of life about the place.
But there are some things in The Void
which have learned to stay alive.
And they've managed to make a life in The Void,
if that's even possible.
And I can introduce you to them if you like.
So when I got a call to do it, I said, "Well, what is it?
"Is it to play an older version of Tom?" That's what I assumed it was.
They put it much more delicately.
They said, "No, you're playing Classic Loki."
So I said, "So it's in the green Lycra bodysuit, with muscles."
They said, "No, you're not gonna have the muscles."
So I'm very distraught that,
having had been born without any, as you can see,
that I thought I would finally...
I would finally get to wear
a green Lycra suit with built-in muscles.
But that hasn't happened. But I've got everything else.
The horns, and the cape, and the, you know, the boots.
When I knew there was gonna be this character,
-there are, obviously, all these Lokis... -Old.
No, no. It wasn't just old. We literally,
there's only one person we thought of. And it was Richard.
If we... If you'd said, "No," I don't know what we would have done, really.
-'Cause it'd be... -You would've gone to...
No. No, no. It was...
In fact, even in the concept art when we were drawing it,
it was drawn with Richard's face. It was like a wish fulfilment.
-Here we are, livin' the dream. -Good.
I'm livin' the dream. You may not be.
-I am in the dream. -You're saying that
-'cause the cameras are rolling. -I'm living in the dream.
Well, thank God that Loki has a sense of humor.
And thank God that the MCU has a sense of humor
because it was just feeling like you could go really
to all corners for inspiration.
In so many ways I kinda thought, there's no acting required
because the costume does it.
I mean, it's so massive, and I'm 6'6".
But then the boots that I have
have, like, two inches on it, so I feel...
I'm probably 6'8" in it already.
And the shoulders are out here.
I betrayed you, and now, I'm king.
My army, my throne.
Something from the comics that I love about Loki is, like,
he has been all these different personalities, you know.
In the early comics, he was very villainous,
but then you have the very different Kid Loki in the later comics.
He's been like a unicorn. He's been President.
I feel like I'm having an identity crisis.
It was fun. It was weird.
We were able to create all of these bandit versions of Lokis.
They all got different nicknames.
They were, like, Glamshades Wolfie, which was kinda based originally of, like,
sort of a tribal leader. Like a shaman.
And we had Poky Loki.
It was just another play on In-Prison Loki. Bicycle Loki.
These are bicycle handlebars,
which I think is very creative,
and you could probably try to make, to recreate at home, if you so choose.
It was endless.
Why the hell is there an alligator in here?
Alligator Loki is wholly invented by Michael Waldron
in the first pitch he ever came to us with.
I'll tell you, for every really dumb idea like that that made it in,
there's a hundred even stupider ones that these guys had to pull me back from.
That's alligator for growling and saying "liar" at the same time.
I remember sending a note to the VFX team from our team,
which was basically like, "We want to have an alligator
"that's very handsome with beautiful eyes."
And I was like, "What is this job?"
Alligator Loki was a very unique character because of the fact that
sometimes the physics of a real alligator are not taken into consideration.
Things like picking him up for instance.
Well, picking up an alligator is a very, very strange thing
because alligators' spines only kind of bend a certain way.
So we were working with ILM on this.
They found a piece of reference
that was one of the best references I've ever seen.
It's this alligator called Wally,
and he is a support alligator.
He's absolutely amazing. So we used this reference
to make our alligator, based off of this particular Wally alligator.
It can't just be an alligator.
It can't be something that's like, "That's just an alligator."
We really wanted it to give that kind of cheeky Loki grin
or that mischievous look to him.
So, we based our alligator off of as much reality as we possibly could.
Inside The Void is a living storm that consumes matter.
You can think of the biggest storm you've ever seen.
Thunder, lightning, dark clouds.
And the storm is called Alioth.
I love monster movies.
And trying to tackle a monster
where we kind of give little tastes and teases of this creature,
but we don't kind of show him off completely until the big showdown.
'Cause I love Jaws,
and I think something really effective about that film is that
you get peeks at the shark, but you don't completely see it
until the big finale on the boat.
And I think, for us, we were really inspired with Alioth by nature,
and nature can be terrifying.
While they were pitching the story,
I literally was like, "Hey, guys, could you give me one second?"
And I jumped on Google.
And I'd seen a documentary on volcanic eruptions,
and pyroclastic flows, and just absolutely beautiful, uh,
thermal lightning inside these pyroclastic flows.
So, I got the job,
and then the first thing that I said as soon as I had boots on the ground was,
"We need to start lookdeving this character."
We put together this absolutely fantastic kind of package
that had a very, very short animation of Alioth
in what I envisioned him to be.
Come and get me! Come on!
The main thing with Alioth is that even Kid Loki describes, as he says,
"He's a shark, and we're in his tank, basically."
I think that was the key thing with Alioth, is that he's a predator,
and he's just there to eat.
And it's great 'cause the TVA are just throwing him loads of T-bone steaks.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
It also happens to be the end of time.
In the final episode of Loki,
after jumping from New York to the Gobi Desert
to the TVA to a Renaissance fair to Pompeii to Roxxcart to...
You get the idea.
- Long, strange trip and all that jazz. - Ow!
After all the space-time shenanigans,
our heroes arrive at their destination.
The end of the road trip
where you get out of the car, stretch your legs, and continue on,
barely pausing to reflect on the journey behind you.
It's a refreshing change to go into the final act of a story,
where Loki is neither leading an alien horde into battle
nor knifing a loved one in the back.
Usually in Marvel, the third act of the story
is obviously, like, a massive battle and a huge, amazing spectacle.
And I feel like our Episode Five of Alioth is sort of
almost like a traditional third act of an MCU story.
Whereas I loved in Episode Six that it was actually more within our show like,
"No, we're gonna sit down, and we're gonna have a conversation
"about all these questions we've put forward to you guys
"over the last six hours."
After a very long journey, Sylvie and Loki are able to discover
that the TVA had an architect.
At the end of time, beyond The Void, beyond Alioth, is a doorway,
and through the doorway is a Citadel.
The Citadel is essentially uninhabited and abandoned.
But there is one solitary light on in the window,
and that light is illuminated by He Who Remains.
I was really inspired by the idea of this kind of manor house
like Sunset Boulevard or Grey Gardens.
These basically big, ornate houses, but there's a loneliness to them.
Then something that Kasra came up with that...
Which I thought was so inspired, was that the Citadel's actually carved
from the rock of this asteroid,
which I think gives it such a beautiful, unique look
with the gold veins running through this black kind of rock.
I really wanted the Citadel to feel like it had big scale,
because it only added to He Who Remains' loneliness and isolation,
and, like, what lengths he's gone for basically
to protect himself from himself.
The Wizard of Oz was a big touchstone.
It's somebody who is looming large over the story
and is the driving force of the mystery of finding the man behind the curtain.
And hopefully being surprised by
what you find when you finally get a peek behind the curtain.
This is wild.
Once you see behind the curtain,
everything is changed.
And so, I think, for that role, it's so exciting for an actor then,
like Jonathan to come in,
and live this character and get to do it.
Because, while they're only here for maybe 30 minutes of this series,
it feels like they are just in the DNA of the entire run of the show.
I'd try to explain what I'm capable of,
but we don't have the million years it would take for you to understand.
Some cultural pop references were, of course, The Wizard of Oz,
Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
The archetype of the wizard and what happens to him
when he gets bored, you know? And he becomes a trickster.
Guys, if I was gonna do an exploding chair,
why wouldn't I just do an exploding floor?
And I think when we meet He Who Remains,
he's on the borderline of those two things.
You don't really know where he's at.
And I think the ambiguity of that is one of the wicked things about it.
You think I'm just here with you.
I am everywhere.
He Who Remains has lived forever.
One of the great things I got to experience
with our costume designer is that
every piece, we decided, was from a different place.
The cape I had on was from the Victorian era,
the shoes are from Genghis Khan, the pants from Mongolia, et cetera.
You just mix and match it together, and it informs the character.
Without the me, without the TVA...
everything burns.
Then what are you so afraid of?
Me.
Jonathan Majors came into this production in our final week,
and has created something,
I think, that it will be talked about for a long time.
-Yeah, we're dancin'. -Very nice.
-We're dancin', just dancin'. -Yeah.
It's absolutely thrilling. And you could feel the energy on set,
because I think the crew knew.
Like, we're watching the flowering of the next phase of the Marvel Universe.
The Variant of He Who Remains,
the one he's been talking about, the one that he's so afraid of...
I'll see you soon.
...is Kang.
Kang is bent on destruction.
And I'm so curious to see what Jonathan does in the future.
I think with He Who Remains, the objective for me
was to give me the largest canvas possible.
And then from that, as Kang begins to rear his head and do his deeds,
in so many ways, he has no choice but to be in opposition
or to be different from He Who Remains.
That was the thing that grabbed me and pulled me into the role.
The fact that Kang lives in so many iterations.
As He Who Remains says, "Reincarnation, baby."
You know you can't get to the end until you've been changed by the journey.
This stuff, it needs to happen.
The potential of a multiverse is literally infinite.
We can already look at our singular universe with awe.
One decision begets another and another.
We like to say
that the possibilities are endless.
But in a singular timeline, that is simply not the case.
Each falling grain of sand in an hourglass
changes how every other grain will fall.
We're both masters of our own destiny and victims of circumstance.
There's simply no knowing how things will turn out,
until they happen.
As William Shakespeare wrote in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
"It ain't over till it's over."
Or maybe that was Lenny Kravitz.
Anyway, the future of Loki is still unwritten,
as it is with us all.
I will be 40 years old when Loki goes out on Disney Plus.
And I was 29 years old when I was cast as Loki,
so it's been ten, going on for 11, years.
It has been one of the great,
if not the greatest, surprise of my whole life, probably.
I mean, it just... It's hard to sum up.
I was a young actor,
and I felt so lucky even to have the chance to audition for Thor.
Today was the first day that I wore this particular costume.
My best friend.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Hello.
In all my fittings way back, you know, four, five months ago,
I kept thinking, "When am I gonna get the horns on?"
'Cause it's almost like the last piece of the jigsaw
in kind of becoming the character.
And to wear this thing is, it feels enormously powerful.
What happened to you on Earth that turned you so soft?
To be cast as Loki
and to have that extraordinary opportunity to make that film,
even as a standalone experience,
was more than I could ever have dreamed of.
As Loki, I had to play the villain and then I had to play the anti-hero.
And this time around is the first chance
I've had to see if we can really break the mold and change him.
Why aren't we seeing this the same way?
Because you can't trust...
and I can't be trusted.
I really want the fans to feel that energy
and feel excited and inspired about where we go next.
You know, we're here at the end of this shoot now.
I hope we've made something that people feel is very special.
I'd love to do one more after this where I don't cry.
I feel very grateful that I'm part of a project
that I think has probably changed the direction of the MCU.
What people don't know is that...
Is that Owen has basically broken open the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
That's what they call it, the MCU.
What's that mean?
-The Marvel Cinematic Universe. -Yeah.
So, the whole interweaving web of all the movies.
They're all stitched together. They all reference each other.
And Mobius has cracked it all open.
It's true.