Those Loki Premiere Time Slips Were All Tom Hiddleston ‘Performing His Heart Out,’ EP Says
Sure, the “time slipping” phenomenon that Loki experienced during Thursday’s Season 2 premiere couldn’t have been achieved without some excellent visual effects.
But it also couldn’t have happened without series star Tom Hiddleston “performing his heart out” to make the time slips look believably exhausting, which he did to great success on Loki‘s set, exec producer Kevin Wright says.
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“Those are going to be really fun behind-the-scenes [reveals] when that eventually comes out,” Wright divulges to TVLine. “It’s all Tom’s performance.”
Loki‘s sophomore debut picked up where Season 1 ended, with Loki having been pushed through a time door to a different iteration of the Time Variance Authority — one where Agent Mobius and Hunter B-15 had no idea who Loki was. As we came to find during Thursday’s premiere, that version of the TVA wasn’t actually a different one, just a past version of the TVA that Loki had come to know. And as the episode unfolded, Loki began to time-slip more and more, which resulted in him getting abruptly and chaotically pulled back and forth to different places in his current timeline. (“It’s terrible. It looks like you’re being born, or dying, or both at the same time,” Mobius explained to Loki after witnessing the time slips up close.)
And though visual effects were responsible for Loki’s actual vanishing and reappearing, Wright tells us that Hiddleston completely committed to the full-body physicality of the time slips, even giving “eight to 10 different performances” for every time slip that occurred. And Episode 1 featured quite a few.
“There is a ton of raw material of him. If he’s being pulled in five different directions, he’s giving you those bespoke performances for each one of those,” Wright explains. “If you were on set, what you would see is Tom Hiddleston performing his heart out and acting those things. And so much of the pain that comes through is because it is baked into his performance.”
And unlike what you might see on other Marvel sets, Hiddleston’s time-slip performance included nary a harness or motion capture suit, Wright confirms.
“It’s his physicality,” the EP says, adding with a laugh, “He was pulling from many years of dance lessons.”
Elsewhere in the Season 2 premiere, Loki introduced us to way more time travel jargon than just “time slipping,” as Loki, Mobius and TVA tech guru Ouroboros (aka O.B., played by recent Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan) attempted to stop the time slips and get Loki permanently restored to just one part of the timeline. But even as the show hopped between the past and present, throwing out terms like “temporal aura extractor” along the way, Wright says it was crucial to him and the writers that Season 2’s timey-wimey logic stay understandable for viewers.
“We would often write for ourselves the really long, detailed version of how all this is working… and then often, as you get into it, it’s about slimming it down, condensing it. Because sometimes, the more detailed it is, the more confusing it becomes, or the more logic loopholes that you make for yourself,” he admits. “Oftentimes, it was about simplicity and visuals. You want it to be fun and intriguing, never confusing and like homework.”
What did you think of Loki‘s long-awaited return? Grade the first episode in our poll below, then hit the comments with your full reviews!
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