Despite the marketing trying to forget Jonathan Majors is a big part of this second season of Loki, everyone involved in the production is acutely aware and, to Kevin Wright’s credit, didn’t shy away from discussing the situation. Honestly, with the lack of really any statement on the matter from Marvel, I was fully expecting to be told Wright wouldn’t be discussing the situation and be asked not to bring it up, which would force me to politely not agree to that and probably canceling the interview altogether. And again, to their credit, none of that happened.
And this second season is a lot of fun as Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) enlist the help of Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) to track down a variant of the evil Kang, Victor Timely (Majors) before he’s found by Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) or Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), who both want to find him for very different reasons. (It’s all a bit more complicated than that because this is a pretty complicated show that kind of dines out on the joke about how a lot of it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, adding to its charm.
Ahead, Wright takes us through this second season and what he wanted to accomplish for the character of Loki and how he convinced new Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan to join the cast. And yes he addresses Majors and how this situation affects Wright as a producer and if there was any talk at all of replacing Majors in this role.
I enjoy how dense the plot is, but the attitude of the TVC is still, “Oh, another day at the office.”
Yeah, look, I’m a details guy. I love shows and movies that just really feel like they are packed dense with information. That you could pause any frame, and that there is a story in there. And I think all of our filmmakers and department heads really enjoy that, too. So it’s just fun world-building…
Does it work without Owen Wilson deadpanning though?
No, and that’s the thing. It’s like you write that character completely straight, and he is going to bring some kind of incredible charm and turn to that character that you could never put onto the page.
There’s a great scene with Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros where Loki is talking to him while jumping back and forth in time, in both time periods. And present-day Ouroboros is getting new memories in real time.
That was an “a-ha” moment. We always have moments, we had them in season one with some of Michael Waldron’s early drafts. And then with Eric Martin on this season, the real a-ha moments. And Eric’s first draft of that introduction is very, very close to what’s on-screen. And it was one of those moments where we all just went, “That’s how we do this.” That’s how we’re going to proceed with our time travel this season.
I think when you see it on the page, that was like, all right, we knew we wanted to do time loops. We knew we wanted to literally do the snake-eating-its-own-tail kind of storytelling structure this season. And it’s a big, fun sci-fi concept. But it also made sense. It was easily digestible. And that’s always our guiding light on this show: intrigue and simplicity, versus confusion and homework. Once it becomes confusing and homework, no good. We’ve got to simplify something or figure out how to land it. But it was just there in that first pass.
And this is the part that you’ve probably had to take PR classes about before you started doing interviews. Jonathan Majors has a trial that starts this month. And I know there’s no way you don’t know this is going to pop up in every review. And I’m not asking you to comment on an upcoming trial. But as a producer, how does this affect you?
Yeah, I think what you said is right. We don’t know what that will all be. But what I can say is the show that is on-screen, that will be, going out, is the show that we wanted to make. Victor Timely was always a big part of that. The story that is there is what was written, what was shot. This is maybe the first Marvel movie or show with zero additional photography. So I think we feel strongly about what the story is, what the performances are. And we’re happy with it, and it’s what the show is. And what happened afterwards, none of us really know. And we’ll see.
Was there any thought, even a quick discussion, about making a change and re-shooting his part? Now that I’ve seen it, he’s in it a lot so I’m guessing that wasn’t possible.
No. And I think it’s because we had shot the show. We made the show. And there’s nothing really to act on at this moment.
Ke Huy Quan is wonderful. When did he get cast?
It happened super quick. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once was playing in LA and New York. It hadn’t gone nationwide yet. And it hadn’t gone global yet. I think it was in that week it was about to go out across America. We got a call on a Thursday evening from Sarah Finn, our casting director. We were in London. We were prepping the show. We were probably starting shooting in two or three months at that point. She said, “I can make you a list for potential OBs, but I think you guys should meet Ke. I think it should be Ke, and you have to act very quickly.”
Did you have other people in mind before he was brought up?
No, not yet. When everyone’s in the writer’s room, things are talked about. I think we knew we wanted probably some kind of comedic vent to it, which could’ve opened up a lot of possibilities. And that was a Thursday night. On Friday, myself, we set up a Zoom. We pitched Ke the show. We pitched him the character. We sent him that first introduction scene.
How did that Zoom pitch go with him? How do you even explain this character?
I would love to go back and see what it was, because I had COVID at the time as well. So I was like, out of it. But he seemed really excited and we made an offer over that weekend. And then that Monday we called in the big guns. And we had Kevin Feige call him and basically say, “Ke, we want you to do this. Will you join the family? Can you come to London?” And he’s kind of on record saying this, he already loved Marvel. He loved Loki, season one. He had already decided he was doing this. And two months later he was in London, helping us develop the character and dig into the script. But it happened really quick. And then obviously the Oscars and everything came afterwards. But he fit right in. He fit right into the team. And I’m sure that was intimidating for him, to come into a team that already had such a great rapport.
How tough is it with just the character of Loki himself at this point? We’ve watched him for 12 years now. He’s the hero of this show, but I feel you put moments in to remind people of the bad things he did. Like when he casually references taking New York City hostage.
Yeah. And this version of Loki is not far removed from that. That Avengers thing that he’s joking about, that happened for him weeks ago.
Right, this version of him just got caught.
But the serious answer to that too though is so much of this season, from season one and now into this one, is about identity. It’s about growth. It’s about what’s your place in the universe? Can you become the best version of yourself? And the exciting path with this variant of Loki – and that we’ve been following for, by the time this ends, almost 12 hours of storytelling – we still have not seen the best version of this guy. And I mean the one that’s fulfilling his potential, which maybe explains when he uses magic in the movies, he’s using it for duplicitous means. He’s using it for mischief.
Now it’s like, we wanted to send him down the path of can you be the best version of yourself? What does that look like? And the idea, can you even become the best version of yourself if you’re not acknowledging your past and where you came from and what you are? And so those reminders coming in, they’re fun, they’re flippant. But they also hopefully are serving, or will have a cumulative effect, of building to this larger story arc that he’s going on.
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