Loki star Tom Hiddleston opened up on what it was like to play the character without Chris Hemsworth's Thor for the first time in his Marvel Cinematic Universe career.
In the interview, conducted by MTV News, Hiddleston said that the polar differences in the two characters helped establish who they were. "There was always, initially in those early stories in the MCU, there was this duality between Thor and Loki and Loki and Thor, and Chris and I had defined these characters together in opposition," said Hiddleston. He went on to suggest that Loki was "always defined by his relationship to Thor" and vice versa.
"One of the things that I was excited by [in Loki] was actually in any drama, if you strip or take away from a character the things that are familiar, then something has to be revealed about what remains," Hiddleston said. "So if you take Loki away from Thor, away from Asgard, away from all the things that he's used to being around -- what makes Loki, Loki?" Loki marked the first time that Hiddleston had played the character without Hemsworth over the course of Hiddleston's six MCU appearances, which began in Thor and ended in Avengers: Endgame. The latter film saw Loki teleporting away with the Tesseract, setting up the premise for the Disney+ series.
"In the ten years of playing this character, or the six movies across ten years, in my preparation and research, I've always found this extraordinary range and complexity, that he has this massive history," said Hiddleston "He has all these different, multitudinous facets and contradictory characteristics, and suddenly this is an opportunity to explore some of that in a new environment, which would then reveal -- probably to me, and I hope to the audience -- new things about him."
The Loki in the eponymous Disney+ MCU series is not the same one that had bonded with his brother over the course of the films following The Avengers, given that version's death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Instead, Loki sees the character fresh from his time in the first Avengers film without any fraternal development. According to Hiddleston, this version of Loki won't be reuniting with Thor just yet, since the character will be absent in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Loki stars Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Sasha Lane, and Eugene Cordero. New episodes air Wednesdays on Disney+.
Source: MTV News, via ComicBook.com