Loki is back this week, which is an especially notable occasion given it is the first Disney+ live-action Marvel Studios series to return for a second season. The way the MCU works, there was always the possibility that plot threads introduced in Loki‘s Season 1 could have been continued elsewhere instead, but as Executive Producer Kevin Wright explained to Fandom, “We knew while we were finishing Season 1 this was coming. I know it’s been two years since the show’s been on, but we never stopped. Even when we were doing additional photography on Season 1, we were already starting to work on developing Season 2 and those scripts, and it just went straight through. So there’s this real sense of continuity and momentum, where we just got to keep telling our story, which is awesome. It’s a deep world and great characters.”
Led, of course, by Tom Hiddleston, the entire cast of Season 1 is back, along with some new additions, including the very welcome presence of recent Academy Award winner Ke Huy Quan as Ouroboros. As Wright noted to Fandom, the introduction of this character actually began with a request from Kevin Feige to see more of the Time Variance Authority and the people that worked there.
Read on for what Wright had to say about getting to expand that aspect of the show and more, including keeping in mind that Loki himself has quite the villainous background.
OB Leads the Way to More TVA
When we meet Ouroboros, or OB, he’s working in an obscure corner deep in the TVA that no one has bothered to go to for a long time. A long time as in hundreds of years, thanks to how the TVA works. As Wright explained, “I think it started as a place with OB in the script of just wanting to explore more of the TVA and see more and just how this place works. Kevin Feige, one of the only notes he gave to us after Season 1 was, ‘I want to see more of it, I want to know who else is working there.’ And so it gave us a great entry point for that.”
OB is a very likable, offbeat fellow who seems to be in remarkably good spirits despite being alone for so long. Said Wright, “The character in the script was always a bit eccentric, because we liked that idea of a guy who has been locked in the basement for 400 years being a little bit just fully in on his work. But Ke brought so much of that too, what he is, to that character in a way that I don’t think we ever could have wrote.”
Quan is debuting on Loki on the heels of an amazing comeback story with his acclaimed and ultimately Oscar-winning performance in Everything, Everywhere All at Once and Wright remarked, “I think it would have been very intimidating for many people to come into this already great ensemble and fit right in. And he did that. He found his own little dynamic; an ingredient that he could add to this great mix.”
Wright has previously explained the rush to cast Quan, when they realized he was about to blow up as Everything, Everywhere All at Once opened, and remarked, “I can’t imagine it being anyone else. And we didn’t even meet with anyone else. It happened very quickly.”
Loki has received a lot of attention for how creative its retro-future TVA sets and props are, which continues in Season 2 with new locations like OB’s large work area. Said Wright, of the show’s detailed sets, “It’s crazy, because so much of it started from the utility of we’re making a streaming show and you shoot very quick so you want to be able to get as much in camera as possible, so we’re not building a big VFX thing in post – which we also do, but you want to choose those moments. And so just actually building this world, building the sets, happened from utility. And then it just becomes this beautiful, all encompassing kind of character of its own. It just makes you want to learn more about it and go deeper into how this place works and who works there and learn more about it.”
Wright added, “Kasra Farahani, our production designer, is a huge part of that, which is why he also joined the writing team and became one of our directors this season too, because he’s just a huge part of creating that vision for the show.”
MISCHIEF NOT MANAGED?
Loki was introduced as the main villain in 2011’s Thor and then became a much greater threat in Avengers. While the character’s inner conflict was always present, and he ultimately reconciled with his brother, having him as the center of a series means we’ve seen him doing a bit more good for a longer amount of time than used to be the case. However, there are some moments in Season 2 that strongly remind everyone just how dark Loki’s past has been.
Of course, this show is specifically about a variant of Loki who was plucked up by the TVA right after his failed attempt to conquer New York and defeat the Avengers and asked if it was always important to keep that inner conflict in mind — and, by extension, to make sure the audience keeps it in mind — Wright replied, “It’s a big part of it. Part of it is yes, you want to make sure that the audience is remembering and two, going ‘Oh, right, this version of Loki, that’s only [from] like a week or so ago. This is all happening very quickly!’ So there’s a fun layer of that and also it’s a bit helpful.”
However, Wright stressed, “A bigger aspect of that reminder is this is a continuation of that story about your search for identity, who you are, your place in the universe. And the thing that we really get excited about is telling the story of Loki and Sylvie trying to become the best versions of themselves. Something that Tom had said to us early in development was that if that is the journey, you’re never gonna get there until you’ve really embraced your past and who you are. You can never progress as a person until you accept and embrace those aspects of yourself. And so it just felt important to not lose sight of that.”
THE TEMPLE OF EASTER EGGS
For longtime comic book geeks like myself, Loki Season 1 had a rather delightful Easter egg when Loki, traveling through the Void with several other variants, walks by the infamous Thanos-Copter from a decades-old kid-aimed story that saw fit to put the Mad Titan in the cockpit of a yellow helicopter with his name on the side.
As Loki Season 1 director Kate Herron told me, back when Season 1 was released, it was none other than Wright who suggested that inclusion. When I brought this up to Wright and asked if he might have gotten similar Easter eggs into Season 2, he laughed and replied, “There are. There are a lot… I’m a details guy and I think why this show works for my brain is the TVA is perfect for that and this world is perfect for that.”
Wright left it be known the Easter eggs didn’t need to be limited to Marvel history, and strongly hinted fans of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies should keep their eyes peeled, when he remarked, “I would certainly say Ke has a really amazing filmography in his past – and now in his present! If you look around [OB’s] workshop, there are some really great Easter eggs in there that make reference to those things. And going forward, this world is full of them. It’s a thing that all of us really love to do.”
And as for giving us with the Thanos-Copter in live-action? Wright declared, “You have to!”
Loki Season 2 premieres Thursday, October 5 at 6pm PT on Disney+.
