Executive producer Kevin Wright humbly admits Loki had an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” quandary heading into its second season.
The first season, following the beloved titular trickster and antihero (Tom Hiddleston) to the end of time and back, drew major kudos from Marvel fans and is generally considered one of the studio’s best Disney+ series yet thanks to its consistently sharp and sometimes droll humor (hello, Owen Wilson!), retro production design and multiverse-expanding action.
So how does Season 2, arriving on the streamer this week, differ?
“I think a thing that Tom and I talked about very early on going into a Season 2 was there was an aspect of Season 1 that felt like catching lightning in a bottle, and that if we just went back and tried to play the hits, even if we nailed it, it wouldn’t be as fulfilling because you’ve experienced it, you felt it before,” Wright tells us in a new interview. “And so the things that got us excited were the things that we were just stoked that the audience responded to, which was so much of the philosophy, the ideas of identity, finding your place in the universe or the multiverse now, and carrying them into Season 2. Because it isn’t just like Loki goes, ‘Oh, I know who I am now.’
Indeed, Season 2 finds Loki reeling from his separation from his variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), last seen killing He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). His death — as he prophesied — leads to not only short-term upheaval at the Time Variance Authority (TVA) but all sorts of timeline-threatening danger, including the inevitable emergence of Majors’s Kang the Conqueror and his millions of variants, as teased at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
One much-welcomed new wild card in Season 2 is Ke Huy Quan, the former Indiana Jones and Goonies child actor who had the comeback of the century last year when he won every major award for his role in The Daniels’ Oscars-dominating multiverse sensation Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Quan, 52, brings a deliriously chaotic energy to Season 2 from the very first episode as OB, the TVA’s basement-dwelling technician (and author of its sacred guide book).
Everything Everywhere had just opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles when Wright, who was in London prepping, got a call from their casting director, Sara Finn.