Loki is back for season 2 and the stakes have never been higher for the future of the MCU multiverse.
“We wanted to keep the tension high and the stakes high,” executive producer Kevin Wright told ET’s Ash Crossan ahead of the season 2 premiere. “Season 1, it’s time travel, the multiverse, craziness. It’s a lot to kind of establish and setup.”
“Because audiences really bought in and got it, we felt like we could just hit the ground running in season 2,” he continued. “And it was like, ‘Great. We get the world, just dive into character stakes and drama.'”
Series star Tom Hiddleston previously told ET that Loki season 2 will pick up right where season 1 left off, following Loki and Sylvie’s (Sophia Di Martino) encounter with Kang (Jonathan Majors) at The Citadel at the End of Time.
After Kang revealed how he harnessed the power of Alioth to create the Sacred Timeline as well as the Time Variance Authority, Sylvie stabbed him in the chest, creating a Nexus Event which burst the multiverse wide open and created chaos that was later seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Wright admitted that considering the future of the entire MCU is a little too much to manage when coming up with storylines for the show, noting that the Loki creative team made a point to focus on the characters in their world of the TVA first, and let other projects take what they need from their created canon.
“Every character story we tell with it is going to have a ripple effect,” he conceded. “For us, we always say we want to just tell our TVA Loki story, and, you know, we’ll throw our rock in the water and the ripple will happen and the rest of the MCU hopefully, you know, embraces that ripple and serves it. But we just were very concentrated on just telling our story — and have had good success so far.”
Part of that success Wright effusively credits to Hiddleston, who also serves as an executive producer on the series.
“Like, he is there at 4 a.m. at the gym working out so he can look like Loki… then take some meetings before we start shooting about pages that we might be shooting next week,” he marveled. “He is a true leader and the cast and crew completely rise to the occasion because they see how hard he is working. It makes everybody else want to deliver too. We’re completely spoiled by Tom Hiddleston.”
A new member of the Loki family this season is newly minted Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, who joins the show as OB, an employee at the TVA who assists Loki and Owen Wilson’s Mobius M. Mobius in their attempt to piece the multiverse back together.
“There is a love and a passion and an energy for [his] projects that just shines through him,” Wright praised of Quan’s performance. “The collaboration that you see amongst him and Tom and Owen and everybody, it was like– I could see that being very intimidating, to try to be the new third part of a much beloved friendship between Loki and Mobius. He just slotted right in and had his own style and his own addition to that relationship.”
The return of the show, however, also brings the question of Majors’ future within the MCU to the forefront. The actor is currently in the midst of a criminal trial for the alleged domestic violence incident that led to his arrest in March of this year.
Based on their previously announced slate of Phase 6 projects, it would seem that Majors’ character will be in play in the MCU until at least May 2025, which is the announced release date of Avengers: Kang Dynasty. However, no official announcements have been made and Wright said he had nothing to share on that front.
“I wouldn’t feel it’s appropriate for me to speculate,” he said of Majors’ involvement in future Marvel projects.
Wright did note, however, that Majors’ legal troubles had no effect on Loki‘s season 2 production or storylines.
“No changes,” he reassured. “This is one of the first shows, movies in Marvel history that we didn’t have any reshoots. We went in with a really strong idea of what we wanted the show to be. And something that Tom always said was like, ‘We’re here. The lights are on, the sets are built, let’s get it now. Let’s not come back in February to to have to pick things up.'”
Loki season 2 premieres Oct. 5, with new episodes dropping every Thursday on Disney+.
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