Tom Hiddleston Reinvents Loki Again
Tom Hiddleston Reinvents Loki AgainWATCH: The star and executive producer of the Disney+ series 'Loki' joined Elaine Low for The Ankler x Backstage FYC event
You can watch the whole conversation with Tom Hiddleston at AnklerEnjoy, home for post-Ankler Events content. While on a tea break during the creation of season two of Loki, showrunner Eric Martin asked Tom Hiddleston what he thought the next chapter of the show should center on. The Loki star heard himself quoting a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time,” Hiddleston recited to The Ankler’s Elaine Low and the audience at the Harmony Gold Theater on April 12, the first event in The Ankler x Backstage Screening Series. “I can't explain where it came from, but basically it was that Eliot expressed far more eloquently and articulately than I could where I wanted to go, which was we had broken this character down.” The first season had taken Marvel’s favorite mischief maker from the world of the Avengers and plopped him into the retro-futuristic Time Variance Authority, but the second season would go even further, prompting Hiddleston’s Loki to examine his entire reason for being. “We'd cracked his psyche open with existential doubt and crisis,” Hiddleston adds. “The journey wasn't over. And I thought, How do we bring it full circle? That's why that line, ‘To arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time’ — it became a kind of North Star.” The theme of the series, in his view, became all about identity. “Who are we really? Can we change? Are we in control of our own destiny?”
Hiddleston certainly didn’t expect the Loki character to become part of his destiny when, at age 28, he was first cast in the role for 2011’s Thor. “It changed my life completely and has changed the course of my life, and it has been a great surprise and a great delight and the journey of a thousand miles,” he says. “I never expected to be here 15 years later, still playing the character, still trying to reinvent and redefine and reinvigorate him. But he's so interesting and so complex and has so much depth and range that always feels like something new to discover.” Follow us: X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads ICYMI
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