When Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff and Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson set sail for their Disney+ shows, they had some familiar company in the shape of Paul Bettany’s Vision and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes. But as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki hops out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline and into his adventures with the Time Variance Authority, he does so without another previously established Marvel companion along for the ride.
As we see in the series premiere, the defining relationship for Loki in this show will likely be with the character of Mobius, played by Owen Wilson. Head writer Michael Waldron has described theirs as a love relationship, though not a romantic one. Hiddleston spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast about the love story between Mobius and Loki as well as the obligation he feels around his character’s canonically queer and gender-fluid identity. You can hear the full interview here, or read some key excerpts below.
When director Taika Waititi was tasked with reinventing the character of Thor for his film Thor: Ragnarok, he did so by stripping away all the things that had previously defined the god of thunder. He cut Thor’s hair, broke his hammer, killed off Thor’s buddies, and destroyed his home of Asgard. In a 2017 interview, though, Waititi revealed that he was told not to mess with Loki. The character was too popular; Marvel wanted to keep him as he was.
But here, in his own Disney+ series, Loki is getting the treatment his brother Thor got in Ragnarok. “Thor is nowhere to be seen, and Asgard is very far away,” Hiddleston says. “There are no Avengers near at hand. He’s even stripped of his status and his power. What is left if you strip Loki of all the things that are familiar to him? What remains? That’s for him to discover as much as the audience.”
Helping Loki through this journey of self-discovery is Mobius, who gives Hiddleston’s character a healthy dose of psychiatric analysis in the series premiere. Mobius, Hiddleston says, is uniquely positioned to help Loki through his first story without his brother Thor by his side. “The thing that was so new and fresh for me was that Mobius is a character who is emotionally detached from Loki’s emotional turmoil and all the tricks that Loki tries to play in,” Hiddleston says. “[The things that] work on everybody else, provocation or manipulation, just don’t land with Mobius.”
While Mobius is occasionally harsh with Loki, there are also some kernels of compassion there. Hiddleston sees Mobius as “delighted,” with an “academic curiosity,” about having Loki in front of him. “They’re both very clever and both trying to outsmart each other, and realize very early on they need each for different reasons,” he says. “That’s a feeling that’s unusual and in needing each other, they might have to try to trust each other, which is going to be very difficult.” Loki head writer Michael Waldron has compared their relationship to the one shared by Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can.
There’s a temptation to slide Mobius into an almost paternal role. He’s capable of giving Loki the approval Loki was dying to receive from his father, Odin. There’s a moment in the premiere where Loki insists he’s very smart, and Mobius genially agrees: “I know you are.” Hiddleston says that moment is “destabilizing” for Loki, who “finds himself in the presence of someone who is confronting him with who he is, who he might be, seemingly without judgment.”
But as Hiddleston goes on to describe the dynamic between Loki and Mobius, it becomes clear that he sees the characters as mirrors of one another. “There’s some similarity there,” he says. “Just a part of who he is mirrored by Loki’s playfulness and an independence of spirit. There’s a kinship there, which is interesting because they’re not aware of it themselves—at least initially.” It’s interesting to talk about mirrors in a show about Loki’s refracted identity, and the possibility of multiple Lokis. Is there any way that Mobius turns out to be another undercover Loki? Maybe not—and that kind of speculation is possibly best left to the podcast, anyway.
The paternal/avuncular/reflective love story of Mobius and Loki aside, longtime fans of the character are eager to know if the Disney+ version of Loki will finally lean into the canonically queer, pansexual, and gender-fluid identity Loki has in the comics. The answer to the latter, at least, appears to be yes. In a TVA file on Loki, the god’s gender is listed as “fluid.” What about everything else?
“I have always been aware of it,” Hiddleston says of Loki’s queer identity. “I see it as my responsibility as somebody who is able to portray this character, at this time, that I honor the aspects of the character which are there in the canon. It was important to [series director] Kate [Herron] and important to Michael [Waldron].… The whole point of Loki is that Loki is a trickster, and crosses boundaries and can represent many different shapes. I was really pleased that we got to touch on that in this series.”
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