Favorite Characters: Loki (Loki)

Watching Loki rekindled my enjoyment of a character who, at his best, is a complex black-to-gray-hat whose relationship with his brother forms the heart of the Thor films. It also made me realize that, while I’ve written about Loki and his relationship with Thor, I’ve never actually given him a Favorite Characters post, a situation that clearly needs to be rectified. Today, though, we’re looking specifically at the Variant Loki we get to know on his Disney+ show, not the main-timeline Loki of the broader MCU (some Loki spoilers.)

After following Loki through his main MCU timeline, continuing to The Dark World, Ragnarok, and beyond, it’s almost a little startling to go back to the Avengers-era Loki of 2012, one who hasn’t experienced the hardships and growth of the later movies. This is a Loki who, despite being fresh off of his defeat at the Battle of New York, is still 100% buying his own hype and looking out for his own interests above anything else. When the TVA brings him in, he’s monologuing about his glorious purpose, threatening agents, and plotting his escape so he can get back to Earth and finish what he started. But while he still hasn’t experienced the events of the later movies, Mobius brings him up to speed quickly, giving him a rude awakening about all that’s ahead for him in the Sacred Timeline. It’s clearly affecting for him to see his future laid out in front of him like that, and it’s humbling too, realizing just how small he is in the face of the TVA.

Variant Loki may get a bit of a jumpstart on his character development, but that doesn’t mean he follows a shortcut to becoming the same person he is after Ragnarok. At his core, of course, he’s still Loki. But he wears it a little differently. His loyalties are still slippery and his morals are highly flexible – when he proves a hypothesis he has about apocalypses, his glee at his success is more than a little distasteful set against the backdrop of Pompeii. You can’t predict which course he’s going to take and why. Slowly and fairly reluctantly, he starts to help Mobius, but it’s hard to guess just how far that help will extend.

But Loki is changing. Due to Mobius’s belief in him (though not full-on trust – Mobius is no dummy) and his growing relationship with Sylvie, a perplexing mirror of himself, Loki begins to think more of others, to crave people’s good opinion of him in a way that’s not just about his own gratification. Episode 3, in which he and Sylvie are desperately trying to get off the soon-to-be-wiped-out moon of Lamentis, is a pivotal one for him. In that episode, I’m impressed not only with how he gently begins to open up to Sylvie but by his reactions to two terrible things: 1) the fact that the TVA agents don’t know they’re Variants who’ve had their memories erased and 2) the fact that most of the people on Lamentis will be left to die. In both cases, he’s stunned, a little disgusted, and slightly horrified. They’re kneejerk reactions that show how his natural instincts are shifting more toward caring about others.

His journey only gets richer from there. In interacting with Sylvie, he starts to care about her, and he also reflects more deeply on himself and the variations thereof, wondering “what makes a Loki,” for good or ill. By the time they’re returned to the TVA, it hurts him to realize that Mobius assumes that Loki betrayed him, and when he reveals that Mobius is an unknowing Variant, it isn’t to taunt Mobius for his ignorance or any kind of lashing-out. It’s because Loki thinks Mobius deserves to know and wants his quasi-friend to know the truth.

This transformation is believably done, even though it’s crammed into a pretty limited timeframe (Tom Hiddleston’s layered performance is obviously a big help there.) It’s an impressive maneuver to take the self-centered post-Avengers Loki of episode 1 and see him ready to risk his life for others by the end of the season. It doesn’t feel forced or implausible. Rather, we see how Loki got here and root for him to continue to make less self-serving choices.

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More MCU folks praising Tony Leung Chiu-wai, which I am always here for. Loving this quote from director Destin Daniel Cretton:

“I think what Tony Leung brought to the character [Wenwu] is something that is so surprising, whether it's for the MCU or just the superhero genre in general. Tony brings layers — layers to this character that are extremely unexpected. He is not a two-dimensional villain. He is a fully realized human who may not make decisions that you agree with, but I do think you will relate to the reasons that pushed him to make those decisions. I think with regards to the conflict between Shang-Chi and his dad, one of the things that we really wanted to remind people of is that, even though this relationship is very conflicted and has a lot of complications to it, there is always love. There is always love there between father and son and the entire family. In a lot of ways that love is the root of their pain [and] that is pushing them to do things that may not be so nice.”

Awesome. God, I can’t wait. I really hope that at some point, we get an interview from Cretton or Kevin Feige or someone about just how Leung came to be in this movie. In a nearly-40-year career, this is Leung’s first Hollywood movie ever. Who thought of him for the character, and how did they approach him? How did they convince him that this was the right film/character for his Hollywood debut? Tell me everything.