UPDATED By the way, when you’re finished this, you absolutely must watch Tom Hiddelston as Loki kicking a kids ass!! Hilarious! Watch the video by clicking here
As Asgard week is nearly done and Thor 2 The Dark World is about to hit cinema screens (unless you’re Stateside, hold on until Nov 8th folks) we caught up with Loki for a serious in depth Q&A!
Tom Hiddleston plays Loki, Thor’s scheming, Machiavellian brother, for the third time in Marvel’s “Thor: The Dark World.” He notes that not only is it a privilege but also enjoyable to be able to reprise a character. “The amazing thing about Loki is that this is my third meeting with him, and we’ve had a year between each film, so essentially my understanding of the character deepens every time,” says Hiddleston. “I feel like the ‘Thor’ sequel and my third engagement with playing him was a chance as an actor to find new depth, new dimension, new iterations of his psychology, of his physicality and his capacity for feeling.”
Q: What is it like playing Loki on this film?
A: It doesn’t happen much in the film business or even as an actor that one is allowed the privilege of coming back to a character that you’ve invented once. Normally, if you’re in the theatre you go on stage, if you’re in a film you do the one shoot and as an actor you kind of develop a relationship with the character that exists for as long as you play it, and then you take off the costume and you walk away and that’s it.
The amazing thing about Loki is that this is my third meeting with him, and we’ve had a year between each film, so essentially my understanding of the character deepens every time, and I feel like the “Thor” sequel and my third engagement with playing him was a chance as an actor to find new depth, new dimension, new iterations of his psychology, of his physicality and his capacity for feeling. He’s, on one level, this off-the-rails psychopathic agent of chaos who exists in the mythology as a kind of wrecking ball. But on a human level, his psychology and his emotional landscape is very, very interesting because he’s so intelligent and yet so broken. This film is a chance to find where his capacity for heroism and his Machiavellian menace meet.
Q: Are the highs and lows of Loki in this film something that you connected with and wanted to have him go through?
A: There are things about Loki in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and Loki in “Thor: The Dark World” which have to stay; he’s still the same character, so he’s still possessed of a rakish charm and provocative wit; he still loves provoking people and finding and exploiting weakness.
He’s still selfish and vain and arrogant and proud, but he’s also elegant and amusing. He’s so full of charisma, and that’s why I love playing him; he’s not an all-out bad guy. He’s someone who knows his true nature and is having a really good time; there is an element of delight and joy at being bad. I think part of that comes from the fact that he’s never had the responsibility of kingship. He’s a free agent, and since he’s adopted and knows who he is, he feels possessed of a confidence that there is no other Loki in the entire universe; he’s the only Loki there is and he loves that.
Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor” was spectacular and action-packed and really funny, and Chris is so charming in that film and Natalie is wonderful too. The relationship between them has such light and they had such a great chemistry, but behind that was the story in Asgard, which felt really weighted and honest and real. There were real feelings being expressed by big characters —Odin, Thor, Loki. We wanted to honor that in “Thor: The Dark World” as well so that you had a sense of emotional weight. What elevates these films from being generic action blockbusters is that the writing and the characterizations are infused with humanity; that the characters are wrestling with things. Thor is wrestling with responsibility and being a man and being a son to his father and also being a son to his mother, and yet having his affection for Jane. Chris’ development in this film is fascinating for that because it’s darker and older and all of these family dynamics just feel like larger incarnations of very truthful human shapes. Everyone in this world has a family; every family bumps heads occasionally, and this family in Asgard is no different.
Q: This is a cosmic story, but they’re still able to ground it in reality. Do you think that’s why these films are so appealing to the fans?
A: Since dramatic stories were told two-thousand, three-thousand years ago, what appeals to audiences—be it sitting around the campfire or sitting in a cinema or a movie theatre—is an expression of truth; truthful human behavior on a huge scale. The Greeks and Romans had it with their gods and monsters, so did the Norse people, and we today have it with movies. We have it with these massive larger-than-life characters, traveling across larger-than-life narratives and scenarios, but the thing that makes them appealing is they are like us. They endure and feel the same things that we feel. They fall in love; they fall out of love. They encounter obstacles to what they want; they have family struggles; they face challenges.
The really exciting thing about the world of Thor is that you have, at the center of it, a figure in a huge red cape that billows in the wind and a hammer and chainmail and he looks like a god, but he’s also a man who is wrestling with his identity and his destiny. He’s arguing with his father, he has a very complicated relationship with his brother—which is where I come in—and he has a mother and a woman he loves. What’s so exciting is that all of the characters within that landscape are infused with a humanity and a humanity that seems to reflect our own. Then alongside it, you have fantastic explosions, which are in 3D and action set pieces that are intrinsically cinematic. They thrill you and excite you, and that’s why we all love the movies. You go to a movie theatre and you forget your life for a bit; you escape into another story that maybe mirrors your own, and we’re all doing it for that magic moment.
Q: How has the relationship between Thor and Loki, and even Chris Hemsworth and you, changed over the course of these films?
A: I’ve always thought of acting as kind of like a tennis match, and you’re only as good as the person you’re playing with. I speak as a huge tennis fan, as well; I love the sport. And the thing that’s exciting about both tennis and acting is that the rally between people is where the magic happens. It’s not necessarily who’s playing, but there’s a particular chemistry that you can have with another actor, and it’s all to do with trust. From the very first frames of “Thor,” Chris and I really trusted each other and when you trust the person you’re acting with you can go so much deeper and you can reveal so much more and it’s just so much more fun.”
One of the great pleasures of doing these films is working with him, because we just sort of get it, and it’s a really nice, rare and unique relationship to have with an actor where anything goes. Because it’s our third film playing these characters, he has such extraordinary input into how Thor now looks at Loki, and we’ve talked about it. In “Thor: The Dark World,” Thor has abandoned the idea of Loki’s redemption and given up appealing to whatever good lay within him. At the end of “Thor,” the first film, and at the end of “Marvel’s The Avengers,” Thor is constantly defending Loki and protecting the best instincts that he knows are still in there.
Q: Why is it important to keep the humorous beats throughout the script?
A: People go to the movies for a good time, and I think one of the greatest strengths of Marvel films, since the very first “Iron Man,” is that they have all had their tongue firmly in their cheek, which means that there’s a part of all of us that knows that all of it is kind of ridiculous, but pleasingly so. We’re inhabiting a very colorful world of larger-than-life characters that do wear capes and originated with speech bubbles with comic book frames. I really take my hat off to the studio, because it reminds me of the films that I grew up watching where you’d see huge action and then everyone would be laughing. It’s a rare thing and it’s a hard thing to pull off, but it would be boring if it were all super heavy. Good stories are always full of light and shade. Even if you go back to Shakespeare in the middle of “King Lear,” the fool starts telling jokes. There is room for humor in every story. It balances out light and dark; it means that you’re invested in both.
Q: What is the evil that Thor and Asgard face in this film?
A: The big bad of this film is Malekith; he is lord of the dark elves of Svartalfheim. Svartalfheim, their home world, is the world of darkness. Malekith, as played by Christopher Eccleston, is trying to get his hands on the kind of nuclear weapon of the dark elves, which is called the aether. If you could infuse the universe with this aether then you would destroy light and being, which is bad news in every sense of the word.
Q: Talk about the realms we’ll see.
A: Asgard is one of the nine realms of the universe, and this is all actually in the Norse myths, but it’s extended and expanded and recalibrated by the Marvel spin on the whole thing. The idea is there’s a “worlds” tree, like a great cosmic tree. Asgard is in it, Midgard, which is Earth is there too plus Vanaheim and Svartalfheim and five others, nine in all. Vanaheim is a is a peaceful realm full of a very rural people who are sort of very connected to the earth, and it’s this sort of rustic community. You see a little bit of Vanaheim at the beginning of the film because Thor is putting out fires all over the universe, which were started while he was down in with The Avengers in New York. Svartalfheim is the dark world; it is a world without life or light, like a dead planet.
We shot exteriors for the Dark World in Iceland, which of all the places on this planet I think is the most magical. It’s got an otherworldly quality to it. It’s so near the Arctic, so close to the uninhabitable regions of this world. In Iceland you get such scale. You get purple skies. We were shooting on a volcanic lava field, and you get epic footage that you can’t get anywhere else.
Q: Could you describe what Iceland reminds you of?
A: It looks like another planet. It doesn’t look like this world that most of us inhabit. There is a place in Iceland that I’ve been to where you can actually look into essentially a fissure in the earth, and you can pretend you’re pushing the continent of America further away or bringing it closer; it’s extraordinary. There are 500 volcanic areas in the world and 200 of them exist in Iceland. It’s bigger than your imagination. It’s a world of ravines and waterfalls and lava and expanses with deserts of black sand and the northern lights and cloud formations. It’s a good place for elves to be from.
Q: Talk about the practical sets and what they mean to you as an actor.
A: Before I start I like to take a tour of the set so I can start to appropriate my own imagination to be specific to the world that I’m working in. When you read a script and it says “Loki’s Cell,” in your mind you have a general idea of what that looks like, but when you come on set, it’s immediately more specific. In my mind it was a sort of a cylinder and I was just at the bottom of it on my own, and then I walked in and the set itself was amazing. The exterior of it was murky and dripping and dank and ancient and medieval, and you could sort of almost smell that there were evil awful cosmic rats that lurk down there. But the cells themselves were these futuristic boxes of white light that sort of plays into this idea that Asgard is light-years ahead of earth in its technology.
But that practical set immediately made my imagination have a little firework display of inspiration and ideas and go, “Oh, if this is what the cell looks like then I could do this. And this furniture is interesting. I didn’t think about furniture, so maybe I can use it; I can sit on it; I can throw it; I can be indifferent to it; I can sit on the floor; I can….” Suddenly it makes the scene incredibly dynamic and you get ideas that are really exciting. Actors, at their best, are responding to real things, that real physical material, and it just gives you a sense of space.
Q: What does Alan Taylor bring to the franchise and what has his process been like?
A: Alan is fantastic and within seconds he revealed his experience and also his openness in creating a really believable world. He’s built on something that Kenneth Branagh created and added extra dimension. I think he wanted to see aspects of Asgard that weren’t just the palace and the throne room; it wasn’t just where the king and the queen and the princes lived, but it was the outlying aspect of Asgard as well.
I thought it was really interesting that he wanted to expand our sense of the world; he wanted to deepen and shade it. He wanted to give it a kind of grittier feel in the sense that this is the race that the Vikings worshiped and there was a very clear link that felt somehow ancient and Viking and Norse and rugged and salty.
Alan’s had a huge hand in the complexity of the story. He’s really good at the subtlety of things, and I’ve enjoyed his understanding and input of Loki enormously. I think Alan loves the part of Loki that is all just effortless. Loki’s enormously powerful, but he can create absolute hurricane-style havoc, with the flick of a finger or the twist of a hand, and it’s been really fun developing that with Alan Taylor.
Q: What will we see in Loki’s wardrobe for this film?
A: There’s his prison outfit, which is an Asgardian equivalent of the jumpsuit. It’s really exciting to see his prison outfit because there are two shapes to it. One is very polished and almost lush. It’s as if he’s wearing a very expensive dressing gown because he’s a prince and it’s been bestowed upon him. The other is when you see him at rock bottom and he has torn his clothes and his hair and his face, and it’s an incarnation of his own self-hate and despair. He’s literally ripped at the fabric of his clothes. That was really exciting to do, because I’ve never done that, because the character is so controlled, so polished, so sleek, it was really interesting for me to break down all of the fact that he’s so well put together all the time.
In the first two films when he’s wearing Earth clothes, he’s wearing impeccably tailored suits with beautiful scarves and he’s just got this extraordinary elegance to him, which comes from a kind of vanity. Deconstructing that vanity was really exciting.
His second costume is a sort of a mix-up of different things. We thought that, once released from prison, it’s not as if he has a huge amount of time to go and see his tailor and get a new outfit. He has forearm gauntlets and he has that shoulder plate from the first one that was scuffed and scraped and scratched. It was as if he’d gone into the armory and cobbled together an outfit that would be suitable for combat. It’s not like public enemy #1 is going to be given the privileges of new armor every time, so I like the fact that the forearm plates are still scratched because he got Hulk-smashed when he was on Earth with The Avengers.
I like the fact that his costume feels a bit more broken down, and yet still kind of, as Americans like to say, badass.
Q: What is it that you love about the fans of Thor and the way they’ve reacted to these films?
A: It’s amazing. The fan responses are beyond any of my expectations, and what’s so thrilling is that people seem to have taken these characters to their hearts and they really believe in the world. They’re thrilled by the spectacle, by the journey, by the action, but they’re also really invested in the drama. We’re human beings and we like to feel, and that’s what I’m so pleased by and I find so gratifying every time I get a letter, every time I meet somebody at either Comic Con or at a premiere.
People are so free with their passion for the emotional landscape of what we’ve created—huge characters with really human weaknesses; characters who are striving for unity and harmony and love and peace, but there are so many things in the way. In Loki’s terms, it’s all of the darkest aspects of human nature—loneliness and jealousy and rage and despair—and these are very human feelings.
I love how the fans have really embraced that and they follow it and believe in it and reflect it. It’s given us the confidence to go deeper with it.
Q: Did you know you were a part of something special when you were working on the first film?
A: In the first film I certainly thought that we were making something unique. Everyone goes to the movies all the time and certain films that could be slotted into an action genre or a fantasy drama or sci-fi tend to be heavy on action and light on drama and emotion. But “Thor” added dimension to the spectacle with feeling and an amazing cast. So, the first film did feel special. It felt like we were doing something a little bit different and every time it’s felt like we’re expanding on that idea.
Q: What are you most excited to see once it hits the big screen?
A: Usually all the bits that I’m not in! The thing that’s really unique about “Thor: The Dark World” is contemporary London. In the first film the action cut between Asgard and Earth, and Earth was a town in New Mexico. In this film it’s Asgard and London, and it’s a very contemporary London that I very much, as a native resident of London, recognize and am excited by. I think there is an amazing opportunity for humor and really delightful fish-out-of-water moments. No one’s going to have seen London in the way they see it in this film, so that’s very cool.
