The first season of “Loki” was the most popular of all the Marvel series to premiere on Disney+, and for good reason: The imaginative world of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and the core relationships established within it — most notably the warm and hilarious partnership between Tom Hiddleston‘s title character and TVA functionary Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) — yielded one of the liveliest and most involving Marvel screen stories since the original “Iron Man.” But as impressive as Season 1 was, it was only a warm-up for the more ambitious, suspenseful, and poignant Season 2, in which Loki finally fulfills a destiny set up for him 13 years ago in the movie “Thor” — though in a way that neither he nor the audience could possibly have predicted.
The trajectory of Loki’s character from “Thor” to “Loki” Season 2 is about as complex a character arc as one can imagine, ranging from pure evil to selfless heroism and every gradation in between. For actor Tom Hiddleston, that’s both the pleasure and the challenge of playing the character. “It always feels different,” Hiddleston told IndieWire. “I get to play every note on the emotional scale.” Just as Hiddleston was able to expand upon and deepen his characterization, production designer Kasra Farahani used the opportunities provided by Season 2 to show additional aspects of the TVA and create worlds in which the characters would face their most difficult emotional, physical, and mental tests — tests which he helped shape as not only production designer but writer and director on Season 2.
The primary directorial voice on Season 2 was that of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, filmmakers who have worked together for over a decade, primarily in the world of indie features. For the second season of “Loki,” they applied their character-driven sensibility to the largest-scale project they had ever tackled and found a sweet spot between spectacle and humanity that culminates in the season’s deeply moving final episode. By carefully planning their visual style ahead of time, they were free to focus on the actors and emotional content of each scene on set, resulting in a season that’s as entertaining and powerful as anything currently on television, comic book, or otherwise.
In the videos below, watch how Hiddleston, Farahani, Benson, and Moorhead crafted the most emotionally complex entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date.
The Acting of ‘Loki’
When Tom Hiddleston first played Loki 13 years ago in “Thor,” he couldn’t possibly have known how much the breadth and depth of the character would encompass over multiple movies and a TV series. In Season 2 of “Loki,” Hiddleston was called upon to find new dimensions in Loki that brought both the actor and the character full circle. “One of the first things Loki says in ‘The Avengers’ is ‘I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose,’” Hiddleston said. “It’s a line that’s full of arrogance and entitlement and hubris. In the first episode of Season 2, Mobius tells a story, and the conclusion is that sometimes, purpose is more burden than glory. Loki realizes he has to make a sacrifice, which is to give his life to protect the lives of others and to sit on a kind of throne. It calls back to a line from the first ‘Thor,’ when Odin addresses Thor and Loki and says, ‘Only one of you can ascend to the throne, but you were both born to be kings.’ Fifteen years later, Loki’s walking up to a kind of throne, but it comes in a shape he would never have recognized and almost a shape he dare not step into because he’s giving his life for others, but he’s consigning himself to solitude.”
The opportunity to play a character who begins as a pure villain and becomes a self-sacrificing hero has proven to be one of the great gifts of Hiddleston’s career. “The constant reward of playing this character is that the character itself contains the whole range of emotions,” Hiddleston said. “He has been playful, mischievous, transgressive, disruptive, spontaneous, unpredictable, mercurial. He’s been full of charm and wit but also had moments of great pain and solitude and loneliness and emotional turmoil and doubt and terror. I get to play all the chords and the keys on the piano; I get to play the light keys, and I get to play the heavy keys in the lower octaves. And I think that’s what’s been so great, so challenging and rewarding and fulfilling: that it never feels like the same gig.”
In the video above, watch how Hiddleston approaches the emotional journey of Loki and works with collaborators across departments to create the character.
The Production Design of ‘Loki’
Hiddleston and other actors on “Loki” have praised production designer Kasra Farahani for creating environments that facilitate their best work. His intricately detailed, often 360-degree sets produce an immersive experience for the audience as well. “I design in a way to give directors and cinematographers a lot of options in terms of getting a shot that’s very memorable,” Farahani told IndieWire. Season 2 of “Loki” has given us some of Farahani’s most elaborate and vivid sets yet, from a recreation of the 1893 World’s Fair to a “temporal core control room” inspired by Cold War architectural designs. Many of the sets grow out of Farahani’s attempt to present a relatable world that exists — at least initially — in a world with lower stakes than a typical Marvel story. “There’s an uncanny reflection of parts of the world the audience lives in, in terms of the bureaucracy,” Farahani told IndieWire, adding that for him, the show’s strength “lies in its particular cocktail of humor and character drama and weirdness.”
Keeping that tonal balance at the forefront is part of Farahani’s all-encompassing perspective. Season 2 of “Loki” provided new opportunities in this regard, as Farahani came on staff as a writer and also directed the “1893” episode. Being in the writers room allowed Farahani to contribute to the show’s world-building from the ground up and maximize his resources as a product designer. “I was able to flex a lot of muscle in terms of proposing the new direction these characters might go in, but also run it against my production design mind and feed that back into the writing process,” Farahani said. “It was as efficient as I’ve ever had the opportunity to be, because you’re getting out in front of some of the pitfalls that you get in writing, which is sometimes writing things that are too big and expensive for the amount of time you’re going to spend in them.” Directing on his own sets provided an additional pleasure and felt like a natural extension of his work. “I design every set the way I would hope it would be designed if I were directing it.”
In the video above, Farahani explains his approach to designing Loki’s sets and talks about directing the ambitious “1893” episode.
The Direction of ‘Loki’
Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead first worked in the Marvel Cinematic Universe on “Moon Knight,” and it was during additional photography on that series that they first learned of the possibility of working on “Loki” Season 2 from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. “The thing that made us pretty excited about it was that he said, ‘We don’t really have any reason to do it if we’re not going to do it completely differently,’” Moorhead told IndieWire. Given that freedom, Benson and Moorhead set about creating a visual style that departed from the first season’s more classical, tripod and dolly-oriented approach. “We did a lot of hand-held,” Benson said. “Low angles, wide angles, and close-up right on the eyeline.” The filmmakers had extensive conversations with cinematographer Isaac Bauman about the guiding principles for the visual style, which he then turned into a 700-page reference guide for everyone on set; that rigorous planning ended up giving Benson and Moorhead maximum flexibility when it came time to shoot.
“We decided to be extraordinarily rigid with our presentation so that we could be much more fluid with the story and the performances,” Moorhead said. “Because we knew exactly what we were going to do walking into any situation with the cinematography, that actually took a lot of the pressure off. We weren’t just figuring those kind of things out on the day, so what we could do is make discoveries in the blocking and the performances.” Moorhead added that the document created for the show also served as a North Star for other directors and helped everyone find a tone that was slightly different from Season 1. “There’s a pervasive sense of doom and dread through the show, and one of the things that results is a phrase that we use a lot, which is just turn down the volume. [That means] quieter performances where it seems people might often be yelling at each other — they end up whispering intensely. These emotions that would normally be heightened [created] a much quieter baseline so that whenever we had to go big, it felt even bigger.”
Watch the video above to hear Benson and Moorhead describe their approach to directing and how “Loki” fits into their overall filmography.