Tom Hiddleston, star of Disney+'s Loki, has revealed his thoughts on the MCU expanding on the multiverse that he helped foreshadow. Hiddleston has been playing Loki in MCU films since his first appearance in 2011's Thor, and has made numerous appearances as the trickster god and brother of Chris Hemsworth's Thor. Throughout the last decade, Hiddleston's Loki has become a fan-favorite of diehard MCU followers, and the announcement of a Loki series in 2019 was one result of that devotion. Season 1 of Loki debuted in summer 2021 and received rave reviews from both critics and MCU fans. A second season is set for 2023.
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A large concept in Loki season 1 was establishing the multiverse, a device that has been used to great effect throughout Marvel Comics. As the MCU has expanded, fans had been waiting for the Marvel to explore alternate universes. Loki, along with the subsequent first season of Marvel's What If…?, finally canonized the theory. Since then, major MCU features such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have used alternate universes and alternate versions of characters as major plot points. As many fans have pointed out, Loki got there first.
According to The Direct, Tom Hiddleston has been extremely satisfied with recent multiverse projects, such as No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness, that have followed Loki season 1. Hiddleston, who is already promoting Loki Season 2, talked about the effect the show has had on the larger MCU, and the feeling he has in seeing the other possibilities of the multiverse play out in other features. Read the full excerpt below:
“You know, it’s been a—even since season one came out, it’s been really exciting. I remember going to see Spider-Man: No Way Home and thinking, ‘oh yeah, there are three Spider-Mans in there, [and we have] two Lokis’… (laughs) it's sort of—or Multiverse of Madness, it’s something that’s now real and exists as it’s as alive for the audience as it was for us when we were making it [but] we had to keep it very quiet.”
How Loki Paved The Way For MCU's Multiverse Saga
One of the challenges the Loki series faced was jumping off of the ending that the character had in Avengers: Endgame. After the character met his end at the hand of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, the Loki that made it out of Endgame with the Tesseract was one caused by a time-traveling Tony Stark altering the timeline and allowing Loki to escape custody. The events of Loki season 1 then concern the actions of this Loki variant causing his own chaos separate from the Loki who would go on to die in Infinity War. Hence, as Hiddleston referred to it, the 'two Lokis', assuming the number stays at two as the series progresses.
If Loki season 1 was this formative to other multiverse projects within the MCU, the pressure certainly must be on to make Loki season 2 just as important. Everything Loki did before No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness was with the central sacred timeline intact; now that the sacred timeline has shattered, there are more possibilities, more options, and more creative ways for the writers of Loki to explore this concept. Eventually, there could be further projects in the MCU that can happen thanks to further developments and ideas in Loki. For now, though, it's a good sign as any that Tom Hiddleston is on board with the projects that his show made possible.