Across his appearances through the MCU, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has been many things – a brother to Thor, a villain to the people of Earth, a friend, a foe, a victim of Thanos, and everything in between. And despite being bumped off in Avengers: Infinity War, he’s back in his own new Marvel show – one that picks up with the alt-universe Loki who escaped with the Tesseract during Endgame’s time-travel trip. For a character who’s never been easy to pin down, his latest adventure seems to find him at his most unpredictable – working (perhaps unwillingly) with the Time Variance Authority to… well, nobody knows yet. And while Hiddleston is keen to keep the mystery of the series intact, he does tease that it’ll be a revealing story about Loki’s multifaceted identity.
Speaking to Empire in his world-exclusive new cover interview, Hiddleston talks about how fitting Loki’s font-shifting title card is when it comes to the show and the character. “I want to preserve the freshness of the show for when it emerges, but something to think about is the [show’s] logo, which seems to refresh and restore,” he teases. “The font of how Loki is spelled out seems to keep changing shape. Loki is the quintessential shapeshifter. His mercurial nature is that you don’t know whether, across the MCU, he’s a hero or a villain or an anti-hero. You don’t know whether you can trust him. He literally and physically changes shape into an Asgardian guard, or into Captain America repeatedly. Thor talks about how he could change into a snake.”
He continues: “I think that shapeshifting logo might give you an idea that Loki, the show, is about identity, and about integrating the disparate fragments of the many selves that he can be, and perhaps the many selves that we are. I thought it was very exciting because I’ve always found Loki a very complex construct. Who is this character who can wear so many masks, and changes shape, and seems to change his external feeling on a sixpence?”
Read Empire’s full interview with Tom Hiddleston – talking his continuing journey with Loki, the directors he’s worked with throughout his career, his time away from the spotlight and more – in the new issue, on sale Thursday 15 April and available to pre-order online now here. Loki comes to Disney+ from 11 June.