As his career continues, Tom Hiddleston will always look back on 2011 as the year everything changed. He appeared in multiple high-profile films, including Steven Spielberg’s War Horse—and he also debuted the Marvel character he’s still playing 15 years later. Hiddleston has traced Loki’s unconventional villain-to-hero journey across Thor, Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and (very briefly) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Loki is so popular he got his own self-titled Disney+ TV series that ran for two seasons.
And we’ll get to see Loki yet again in December’s Avengers: Doomsday. That’s a long time to be associated with a character, and Hiddleston recently admitted he’s surprised that he’s still part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He’s probably not the only Marvel actor to have that feeling, truth be told.
“I never expected to be playing the character for this long,” Hiddleston told Variety. “But he’s a brilliant character of such depth and dimension … I knew where we had started in Thor, and I wanted to get back to his capacity for love and his belonging to his family. I wanted to somehow find a way of completing that arc. It’s a long journey.”
However, Hiddleston did have some inkling that Loki might have some staying power. In his earliest MCU days, Hiddleston said, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige let him know that Thor was just the beginning.
“He said, ‘Well, we’ve made an Iron Man film, we’re going to make a Thor film, we’re going to make a Captain America film, and then we’re going to make an Avengers film, which is Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, the Hulk, and Hawkeye forming a team. In the first edition of the first Avengers comic, from 1967, the villain is Loki, and we want you to be the villain.”
No word, of course, on what Loki’s “glorious purpose” might be in Doomsday, but we’ll find out December 18.
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