The Marvel Cinematic Universe has gifted superhero fans with a bevy of incredible characters to obsess over in the course of its 13 years. Among those beloved characters is Tom Hiddleston’s anti-hero Loki, otherwise known as the slippery and untrustworthy god of mischief. We’ll be seeing more of Loki in his upcoming eponymous series on Disney+, but the trickster deity’s solo adventure almost never happened — he was never meant to be an MCU staple.
Loki is set to hit Disney+ in June, following up the successful MCU series WandaVision and The Falcon & the Winter Soldier. The forthcoming show will see Hiddleston reprising his mischievous character, but not from the timeline that we’ve been following since the events of Avengers: Infinity War; the Loki we know was brutally murdered by Thanos (Josh Brolin), and this Loki is from the different timeline that occurred as a result of the Endgame time heist. (Confusing, we know.) In Loki, the other trickster god has been apprehended by a time traveling organization called the TVA and recruited into its ranks, commissioned to travel through the multiverse to help keep the timeline together.
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The show offers up a fascinating premise as well an important hint at the limitless future of the MCU, yet Loki almost never happened. In a new interview with EW, digital cover star Hiddleston revealed that his character has been written off many, many times. Loki was ideated as the foil to Chris Hemsworth’s brawny, heroic Thor, meant to give the thunder god a reason to team up with the human Avengers on earth. He was originally just a complicated means to an end.
“I just knew that in the structure of [The Avengers], I had to lean into his role as a pure antagonist," Hiddleston told EW of his character. "What I always found curious and complex about the way Loki is written in Avengers, is that his status as an antagonist comes from the same well of not belonging and being marginalized and isolated in the first Thor film. Loki now knows he has no place in Asgard."
At the end of the first Avengers movie, Loki was imprisoned on Asgard for trying to take over the Earth, and Thor: Dark World saw him freed and later killed in battle with the film’s antagonists. At that point, both the MCU and Hiddleston were sure that his time in this story was up; the studio actually had every intention of closing the Loki chapter in the superhero canon because he’d served his purpose. But Loki was saved — partly by the fans’ poignant devastation over his presumed death — and reappeared in Thor: Ragnorak and Infinity War. He died, but that end gave way to a new beginning in the MCU’s fourth phase, which will be marked by the introduction of new characters and new worlds. And who better to traverse these new planes and rub shoulder with these new heroes than the person best known for changing forms and traveling through time?
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Will Loki be the last that we’ll see of Hiddleston within the MCU? Probably not; Thor: Love & Thunder is still in the works. Beyond that, though, any future sightings of Loki might be versions of him from a parallel reality, a storyline that’s made possible with the confirmed existence of the multiverse. The truth is that nobody knows what Loki will do next. Not even Hiddleston.
"I'm open to everything," the actor concluded. "I have said goodbye to the character. I've said hello to the character. I said goodbye to the character [again]. I've learned not to make assumptions, I suppose. I'm just grateful that I'm still here, and there are still new roads to explore."
Loki will premiere on Disney+ on June 9, 2021.