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Tom Hiddleston has taken the “digital cover” of Entertainment Weekly to promote the Disney+ series Loki. I’ve been looking forward to Tom’s promotional tour and here we go! I actually appreciate the fact that we haven’t been inundated with wall-to-wall promo. Marvel, it seems, has learned from past mistakes and they understand that less is more when it comes to Hiddleston specifically. Still, Tom talks and talks and talks with EW. None of it is personal, really. He’s not dumping out his purse about Taylor Swift again. It’s all about the series and the eleven years he’s spent with this character. Something I didn’t know: Tom executive-produced the series, which is great news. Some highlights:

Tom felt responsibility: “Rather than ownership, it’s a sense of responsibility I feel to give my best every time and do the best I can because I feel so grateful to be a part of what Marvel Studios has created. I just want to make sure I’ve honored that responsibility with the best that I can give and the most care and thought and energy.”

What the series sets out to do: “One of the things Kevin Feige led on was, ‘I think we should find a way of exploring the parts of Loki that are independent of his relationship with Thor,’ or see him in a duality or in relationship with others, which I thought was very exciting. So the Odinson saga, that trilogy of films, still has its integrity, and we don’t have to reopen it and retell it.”

Eleven years with the same character: “I’ve been playing this character for 11 years. Which is the first time I have said that sentence, I realize, and it [blows] my mind. I don’t know what percentage that is exactly of my 40 years of being alive, but it’s substantial.”

He had no idea where Loki portaled off to after snatching the Tesseract. “Where’d he go? When does he go? How does he get there? These are all questions I remember asking on the day, and then not being given any answers,” Hiddleston recalls. To be fair, it’s likely the Powers That Be didn’t necessarily have answers then. While Feige can’t exactly recall when the writers’ room for Endgame first devised Loki’s escape sequence, he does know that setting up a future show wasn’t the primary goal — because a Loki series wasn’t on the horizon just yet. As for Hiddleston, he didn’t find out about the plans for a Loki show until spring 2018, a few weeks before Infinity War hit theaters. “I probably should not have been surprised, but I was,” says the actor. “But only because Infinity War had felt so final.”

We need Loki: “I love this idea [of] Loki’s chaotic energy somehow being something we need. Even though, for all sorts of reasons, you don’t know whether you can trust him. You don’t know whether he’s going to betray you. You don’t why he’s doing what he’s doing. If he’s shapeshifting so often, does he even know who he is? And is he even interested in understanding who he is? Underneath all those masks, underneath the charm and the wit, which is kind of a defense anyway, does Loki have an authentic self? Is he introspective enough or brave enough to find out? I think all of those ideas are all in the series — ideas about identity, ideas about self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and the difficulty of it.”

Making ‘Loki’ during the pandemic: “It will remain one of the absolute most intense, most rewarding experiences of my life. It’s a series about time, and the value of time, and what time is worth, and I suppose what the experience of being alive is worth. And I don’t quite know yet, and maybe I don’t have perspective on it, if all the thinking and the reflecting that we did during the lockdown ended up in the series. But in some way, it must have because everything we make is a snapshot of where we were in our lives at that time.”

Whether this is finally his last outing as Loki: “I’m open to everything. 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.”

[From EW]

While I’m not super-involved with Marvel storylines, I appreciate the work and professionalism Marvel and their actors bring to these franchises. There’s a reason why Tom has played Loki for eleven years and why Tom is evidently one of Kevin Feige’s favorite actors: it’s because Tom works hard, is game for anything and he takes care of his side of the road. And that should be applauded and I hope Tom is getting PAID, big time. Oh and here’s a new trailer.

#Loki takes over! Ten years after @twhiddleston first chose chaos in #Thor, Marvel’s fan favorite God of Mischief is going even bigger with his time-bending @DisneyPlus show. https://t.co/qQrfbzdxkh Story by @chancelloragard pic.twitter.com/VfAnJmWski

— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) May 20, 2021

Cover & IGs courtesy of EW.