Here we are. It's go time. Day one. Day one of 90.
Monday, June the 13th, 2022.
London, U.K.
Time doesn't exist in the TVA and it doesn't exist in Loki's world.
And here we are. (CHUCKLES)
Although, it exists in my head.
I woke up this morning full of excitement and full of gratitude, actually.
I just felt so lucky that I get to do this and I'm still doing it, and...
Yeah, I'm just, I'm excited to be back.
Back in the game, back in the TVA, back with this amazing team.
KEVIN R. WRIGHT: We were all excited to explore and unleash
the Multiverse in Season 1...
Something terrible is happening.
When you're dealing with time travel, with the Multiverse,
the plot can get very heavy.
And the only way any of that works
is usually to make it as simple as possible
and to lean into your characters.
Mobius, it's me.
I don't know you.
ERIC MARTIN: On the outset, we have to have all those conversations
about where this is gonna fit into the MCU,
where this will fit within all the other stories,
and how it will impact all the other characters.
But as much as we could, after we had those conversations,
we tried to step back and just look at this as,
"Okay, now let's tell our story."
You were a villain and now you're not.
I thought we were good guys. Now I'm not so sure.
At the very least, you've made us ask some appropriate questions.
Our approach was really, really doubling down
on who Loki cares about, who we care about.
And then even trying to personalize the stakes of,
"What is a timeline? What is on a timeline?
"What does that mean to people?"
Our job just really became helping steer these characters into the vulnerability
that brought their humanity to the surface.
I know it's hard to turn your back on everything you have believed in.
But the TVA has to change and it has to change now.
It's almost like a snow globe.
You know, the TVA was a kind of snow globe
and the glass has been cracked
and the whole thing has been shaken up,
and so, the TVA is in a process quite similar
to the process Loki went through in Season 1,
which is a process of soul searching and institutional analysis.
That's who built this place! That's who stole your lives!
I think one of the things we talked about is,
he always struggled with family in the MCU,
but he's found a new family in the TVA.
Let me ask you, the Time Door somehow sent you into the past
-and that's what started all this? -Well, it was...
Which way are we going?
The chemistry between the actors
is something we wanted to continue to explore in Season 2.
They just really got along, right,
they kind of clicked from the moment that they were on set together
and had so much fun.
And we wanted to take that further.
-We did it! -We did it!
We won!
It's a really special group of people.
Series 1 was full of challenges, you know.
There was a global pandemic and I think that actually brought us together.
And I think it shows onscreen.
-Wow, wow, wow. -Very nice, very nice, very nice.
WUNMI MOSAKU: It was great coming back.
It had been a long time since we'd seen each other.
It's tricky thinking about, like, who B-15 is in Season 1
and who she evolves into in Season 2.
I had to rewatch Season 1.
And you go, "I remember what happened but who was she again?
"And how does she sound? How does she move?"
And then, you put on the costume and you go, "Yeah, I remember this."
Hey, O.B., this is Casey. I thought he could help.
There's a lot of performers that I didn't get to play with in Season 1.
And this season, I got to...
play with everybody else, and I mean everybody.
And there is a chemistry there that is amazing.
And I think by introducing a bunch of new characters,
you got to see more of the world of the TVA.
You're Ouroboros?
-Yes. -You wrote the TVA Handbook.
-You've read it? -Read it? I practically memorized it.
-Would you sign it for me? -Happy to.
KE HUY QUAN: It's really exciting because I've been a fan
of the Marvel Universe for a long, long time.
Oh, hey, welcome to R&A.
And I always fantasized about joining the MCU family.
But I didn't think it would ever come true
because it wasn't until recently that I got back into acting.
And one day, my agent told me that,
"Kevin Feige is going to give you a call."
And he told me between a certain time, between 5:00 and 7:00.
And I was so nervous.
At the same time, I was also very, very excited.
And I remember, I was in a meeting at that time,
and I told the person I was having a meeting with,
and I said, "I'm so sorry,
"but at 4:50, I'm gonna have to leave."
And I didn't tell them why.
So I set my alarm clock at 4:50.
And when it rang, I got out of there,
expecting this important call from Mr. Kevin Feige.
And I was just driving home, and all of a sudden, my phone rang.
And I picked it up, and on the other end,
you know, I heard this voice,
"Hello. Hi. I'm Kevin Feige. Hello, Ke."
And he was telling me
about how much he enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once.
And I was driving, and...
he was just praising my performance and praising the movie.
And I started getting teary-eyed.
And I was driving and I couldn't see.
And I had to pull off to the side of the road.
And... And we're talking and then,
then he said, you know, "Would you like to join the MCU family?"
I was... I was ecstatic.
I was so happy.
And to get that call from him meant the world to me.
It's great being part of a team.
And sure enough, couple of months later,
I was on a flight to London.
There you go. That's everything you need to know.
WRIGHT: O.B. was a character who was a really fun introduction
to the Repairs and Advancements world,
and another interesting kind of leaf to kind of uncover at the TVA.
Everything you need to know about this, I wrote about it in here.
WRIGHT: Similarly, we wanted to tell more stories with our Minutemen.
So we will meet General Dox who is played by Kate Dickie,
or Hunter X-5, who also becomes Brad Wolfe, by Rafael Casal.
Oh, good. Welcome back. Why don't you take off this Time Collar
and treat me like somebody who outranks you?
Oh, I don't work here.
Oh, I'm glad that you know that. You should stop talking now.
RAFAEL CASAL: X-5 Brad Wolfe is an antagonist for Season 2.
It's a weird phrase on a show that's about an antagonist.
You know, we're all in a show
that is about exposing the duality and humanity of the antagonist.
And so, in a lot of ways, the way we talked about
X-5 and Brad Wolfe
was as Loki's sort of mirror for Season 2
of another person who feels wronged
and is trying to find the justice of themselves,
and is also trying to figure out what the goodness in them means.
You could do with a little perspective on yourself, so let me help you here.
It's you. You're the problem.
Every single time we've come across one of you, it's you.
A lot of my job was get under Loki's skin.
And so, I think Tom and I got to have so much fun with that.
(BOTH LAUGHING AND SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
And what's great is that the character X-5 of Brad Wolfe
has worked at the TVA so long
that he's read his file so many times.
He knows him so well.
Earlier, I said some really hurtful things,
even brought up your mom. I'm very, very sorry about that.
What does this one do?
CASAL: Tom is the person who's setting the tone for everything.
And he and I would talk a lot
about setting the floor and setting the ceiling for the show.
And what you do is you look at Tom to know how big to go and how small to go.
-And now we know what the numbers are. -Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
CASAL: And he's a veteran in this world, he knows,
you know, what a scene needs.
So it's amazing to sort of watch him
set those markers in a scene, like, "All right, let's...
"Let's play this one this way or play this one really big."
You wanna be, ideally, chasing the bike and I'm chasing...
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of us haven't ever acted in something this big before.
We go, "All right, yeah, this is a world where people teleport
"and blow out walls, and like, fly through space and time."
I need a little help adjusting, you know, you gotta help me get there.
MOORHEAD: Tom is way beyond just the lead performer.
He is in the writers room, he is in the visual effects meetings,
he is right there with us.
He is very much the author of all things Loki.
A group of people who have a collective aura,
unique to that moment in time.
Does that make sense?
Sort of like you're drawing the...
RICHARD GRAVES: Tom is fabulous.
He will always want to give that extra take.
The extra... The extra 20 percent.
And he comes in wanting to give, wanting to perform.
PAUL ZUCKER: There's something that he's working towards.
And my job as an editor is to listen to his performance.
For Tom, there are shades to it.
He may adjust his pace,
he may adjust his intensity.
But by and large, he's very, very focused.
It's not about where or when.
It's about who. Who I care about.
I can rewrite the story.
-And, scene. -(ALL LAUGH)
QUAN: What's really interesting,
every morning, the way we began the day,
Tom would walk onto the stage,
but before you see him, you would hear him,
because he always comes to set
with a little, you know, portable speaker.
And you would hear him enter the stage,
make his way to the set,
and when he arrives, it just wakes everybody up
and lifts everybody's spirit up.
And that's how we start the day every day.
CORDERO: It's amazing just having him there,
leading the way as Loki,
and then, everybody else just having, like, a fun ensemble.
And it's a great ensemble that will save,
you know, humanity.
I mean, honestly, that's what we do here at the TVA.
LOKI: We should be dealing with the bigger problem here.
-He Who Remains. -I understand and we'll get to that.
In order to do that, I need a Loki Who Remains.
We need to address you disappearing.
WRIGHT: We knew we wanted to embrace the idea
of time looping throughout this season.
We talked a lot about Slaughterhouse-Five, the Kurt Vonnegut novel,
where there's somebody who's slipping through time, uncontrollably,
trying to figure out how to make sense of their life and the narrative
because they're experiencing it all out of order.
And there was something in that that was really compelling with Loki.
He desperately is trying to get back to our TVA
and let them know something terrible is coming.
And yet, Loki can't even just stay in a single place.
Something had happened to the nature of time.
Once He Who Remains is killed by Sylvie,
the timelines start to branch.
And essentially, Loki's anchor in the dimension of time
becomes unstable.
It's real, Mobius. I'll be in the past TVA
and suddenly I'll feel it all grow thin and I'll be torn apart,
pulled through time, ripped from there to here.
-How is that possible? -I don't know.
But I don't know how long I have until it happens again.
HIDDLESTON: His physical presence doesn't have a secure grip
on temporal reality.
You know, even right now, I think,
I am here now.
I'm here in space, but I'm here now.
And Loki's having a problem,
which is that he's rooted in space but he's not rooted in time.
And so, he's essentially glitching...
Damn it!
...between the past, present and the future.
He's in one place, and then, suddenly he's in the same place
but at a different time.
It's incredibly destabilizing for him
and for everybody who's in his presence
because it looks like he keeps disappearing.
-You just disappeared. -I know.
And I can't keep looking at it 'cause it's horrible.
What? I thought you said it didn't look that bad.
I was lying.
CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND: It's sort of evolved as we've been discussing this
on a script level and also a character level and a visual level.
And realizing that one of the things that could be very interesting
is making it a very painful experience.
And Tom has really embraced this.
So it's kind of a windmill and down.
And he has given us these incredible performances
that we in visual effects will be joining up these various elements of him
as he goes through and flickers through these different time periods.
HIDDLESTON: Loki's body is being molecularly ripped apart.
Ripped... Every... Every atom, every cell in his body
is being ripped and pulled apart, disassembled,
and then reassembled very quickly
and kind of re-ripping in another time.
TOWNSEND: There's a line about looking like
he's being born and dying all at the same time.
And that idea of how do you visualize that,
how do you actually make it feel
gruesome and almost like a horror movie.
But not in a bloody guts and gore way,
but something that's a little bit more stylish and elegant.
This is where I'm embarrassed to say that in my
limited carpet bag of physical abilities,
I can't, in fact, time slip.
So we've had to find a way.
Obviously, I knew at some point, I was going to be
brilliantly assisted by our visual effects department.
And I wanted to give them enough to work with,
so we tried to film different variations
of being spun into or spun out of,
or ripped away from,
or pulled into, reality.
TOWNSEND: And then can you do one where you're lunging right at the camera?
So you come back at camera,
twist around and come right back at the camera.
He's giving us all these things and he's throwing himself
into the, sort of, performances absolutely brilliantly.
You couldn't have asked for a better performer
and a better partner in this sort of endeavor.
Maybe I'll do one this way too?
And then spin around, yeah.
In the edit, we basically brought all those elements together.
We picked out, you know, the... The craziest swinging of arms,
and we created an effect in the edit for that.
And then with that, we played with sounds.
We had stretching sounds and bone crunching sounds
and all kinds of things that would really enhance
the visuals for the time slip.
And then, we're taking those performances
and then creating this sort of meld between them all
and then stretching between each performance.
And in 3D, on the computer,
we're simulating, we're joining up these performances
and we're using simulation software and modeling software
to stretch one performance to another
and make it feel like he's being ripped through time,
and being born and dying all at the same time.
I take my hat off already
to the visual effects team for helping me out.
But it has been a really physical thing.
More physical than I thought it was going to be.
London School of Contemporary Dance.
It allowed us to play a fun game
of letting Loki slip through various moments
across all these branches of the Sacred Timeline.
But he's always being pulled to people that he knows,
or places that he's been before.
And then we start to realize that maybe in some way,
Loki is the glue that's holding all of these things together.
Every one of your friends has a temporal aura, right?
Right.
Well, that means a group of people
would have a collective aura unique to that moment in time.
MARTIN: With each person in the TVA,
we wanted to go further into who they are,
what's driving them to do everything.
And they're all existing in this sea change moment.
Tell the TVA to stop pruning, effective immediately.
(GRUNTS)
MARTIN: Everybody at the TVA, they lived one path,
and now they're suddenly told that, like, that path was foisted upon them,
that they had other lives, that they are all Variants.
I'm not a hunter, you're not an analyst.
None of this is real.
You know, it's really hard to keep an eye on the whole story.
Because there's just, there's time slipping,
there's past Loki, present Loki,
past B-15, present B-15,
B-15 Variant on the timeline,
and you know, there was, even just the other day, we were like,
"Oh, this is the first time we've seen Loki time-slip."
And I was like, "No, we've seen it before."
And they're like, "No actually,
"we just shot out of sequence, you haven't seen it.
"And that wasn't you, that was B-15 of the timeline,
"that wasn't B-15 in the TVA."
I was like, "Ahh!"
MARTIN: There were many conversations had about how is everybody gonna respond,
knowing that they had lives on the timeline.
B-15, she had a different experience
because she was shown by Sylvie what her life was on the timeline.
I looked happy.
What now?
MARTIN: So when she comes in,
she has kind of a resolute feeling about that.
And she wants to get back to that,
but she also has to kind of fight for that to exist for other people.
People have lives on the timeline, Mobius.
They have to have the chance to live those lives.
The beauty of the writing is that everyone has a journey.
And, like, for me personally,
I start off in my full armor
and Time Stick and bringing down gods.
I end with a crooked tie and no armor.
She becomes softer and softer
and she's moving towards who she once was on the timeline
rather than what the TVA made her.
MOBIUS: No turning back now.
Who said anything about turning back?
OWEN WILSON: The scene today is,
Loki is returning to the timeline to find Mobius,
who is living his original life where he is working...
Actually, right here, yeah. It's called "Piranha."
Piranha Powersports.
And they offer, you know, things like this.
Well, they say the personal watercraft is kind of the thinking man's dirt bike.
Come on, you ready for your Poseidon moment?
Jump up on this bad boy.
How do I create a persona between Don
that's different from Mobius? Well, Don is a salesman.
And so, it kind of has a bit of that personality in trying to make a sale.
Hey, you know the Hawaiian word "mana"?
It means "spiritual life force that permeates the whole universe."
You ready to jump up on this bad boy and start sucking up the mana?
And Mobius is a little bit more of a cynical detective type.
You gotta be careful when you've been doing this as long as I have
because you can start to phone it in if you're not careful.
Because it all gets a little bit predictable, stale.
But you are breathing new life into this song.
WRIGHT: The situation is funny, the world is funny.
The characters have... have character to them.
Like, Mobius can be eccentric
because Loki is eccentric, he just is.
But, like, they don't see themselves that way.
They're the straight man in this absurd world.
Wind in the hair, little mist slapping you in the face.
And nothing but open water in front of you.
Man, I feel like I'm shredding glass today.
On the timeline, O.B. is a sci-fi writer.
QUAN: His name is A.D. Doug.
PhD, extremely smart guy.
But he's a passionate writer.
And he writes these amazing science-fiction novels
that nobody wants to read.
Hey, look! You're lucky. You should really give this a try.
And right now, we are in his garage, his workshop.
And it is one of the coolest sets I've ever seen.
What's so surprising on this series
is that a lot of the sets are practical.
And it's something that I'm used to
because back in the '80s, that's how we made movies.
And it's really a sight to behold.
Is this room safe?
Yeah, this whole area is totally abandoned.
No one's around for miles.
CORDERO: Knowing that you were plucked from a timeline
to work at the TVA
just gives you a lot to wonder
about who this person was before this.
Casey. Thank God you're here.
How'd you get here?
How did I get where? Where's here?
Alcatraz.
Being able to see Casey as a Variant
and doing these Alcatraz scenes
was awesome.
The fact that Casey was this prisoner,
I thought that was the coolest turn.
I remember when looking at the script, going like,
"This is not what you really want me to do. This is amazing."
You gotta find your own way off this rock.
Sorry, pal.
We meet Brad Wolfe in Episode 1,
and he's looking at Mobius's jet ski magazine.
And part of that is him just realizing, like,
"Wait a second, there is a greater world out there
"that I haven't really experienced."
WRIGHT: He's gone back in time, he sort of gamed the system.
He can't go back and make Star Wars,
he can't do something giant that's going to change the course of history.
But he could go, "Well, what if I start making comic book movies?
"What if I start doing these things before they got really big?"
X-5 is an actor now?
Or he's undercover.
Looks pretty real to me.
Behind us is the Zaniac premiere in the 1970s.
There's a big crowd here ready to see movie superstar Brad Wolfe
in his leading role as the Zaniac.
And Loki and Mobius have shown up
to try to figure out why X-5's tracker is leading them here.
And they're astonished to find that he's this completely different person now
and they need to get to the bottom of it.
How do you feel about your meteoric rise to fame?
I don't know how I feel, but I look good.
Come on, look at this.
Pretty darn good.
I think Brad's movie is probably not going to stand the test of time.
Come on, Mobius. You're gonna ruin my life here.
Your life here?
You know, getting to burst through doors and, you know, run down alleyways
and jump down staircases and go underground at times,
and do this crazy maze getting chased by a god,
is always an adventure in itself.
You're doing your own stunts now?
Real cute.
DI MARTINO: I remember having a conversation
with Kevin Wright, the producer,
after we shot that scene where Sylvie kills He Who Remains.
And it was the last scene that we shot
in Atlanta, on Series 1.
And he said to me, "Where do you think Sylvie goes next?"
And I was like, "Where do you think she goes next?
"I think she'd be really hungry." (CHUCKLES)
And that was my lesson in being careful what you say to producers.
Because next thing I know, I'm in a McDonald's uniform.
Ordering everything on the menu.
How do I do this?
What would you like?
Not squirrel, not possum, not rats.
Something that's already dead, and nothing with a face.
Please.
It's just a metaphor, really, for Sylvie wanting
to experience what it's like to be in the world.
And not to have to be on the run the whole time,
not to be hiding out in these apocalyptic places
where she's constantly in danger,
but to experience what it's like to be normal.
HIDDLESTON: She is on a branch of a timeline,
essentially, for the first time,
inhabiting free will.
She's never had it. Sylvie wasn't supposed to exist.
She's not part of the Sacred Timeline
so she's been on the run from the TVA since she was a child.
And... And this is her first chance
to experiment with freedom, with choice.
Look, Loki, as much as I'd love to see the TVA burnt down,
I have no intention of going back there.
My life's here now.
Sylvie realizes how much she's missed out on
and she begins to make connections with just a few human beings.
And she starts to realize how important that is to her.
Your friends are back where they belong.
But without them...
Where do I belong?
We're all writing our own stories now.
BROUSSARD: We had a really amazing team on Season 1
and we wanted to retain as much of that crew as possible,
so production designer Kasra Farahani
is production designing Season 2 as well.
He stepped into the director's chair for one episode.
Same for visual effects supervisor Dan DeLeeuw,
who we made a bunch of movies with in the visual effects department.
Multiple Academy Award nominee for that work.
And it's been fun to watch people step into new roles and really deliver.
Similarly, we had an amazing experience on Moon Knight with Aaron and Justin.
And they've stepped in to kind of be the anchor director role
on this one, directing four of the six episodes.
All four of our directors, you know, Aaron and Justin, Dan, and Kasra,
have been so sympathetic
to what we created in the first series.
They know that it's already a sort of live, big beast.
So they haven't come in and just tried to change everything.
But they've each subtly put their mark on their episodes.
A greater portion of our body of work
is characters who grow in such a way
that they become less the villain of their own story
and more the hero of their own story.
This is where it all started.
MOORHEAD: There's a sci-fi aspect of Loki
that dovetails very nicely with all of our work,
and in the same way that Moon Knight had a lot of permission to be weird,
one of the first things that Kevin Feige ever said to us
when he was asking if we wanted to do Season 2 was,
"We don't want you to do it if it's not gonna be something different."
And I think that really got us engaged with the whole thing,
that it can be as weird as we would want it to be.
So it's not like you're going... Like that.
It's because he's still jumping, so it's more like you're here, down.
They come from a sort of horror background
and I can tell when they're shooting
that they love, like, a slow zoom-in on the face,
they love a bit of symmetry, they like creating atmosphere.
That's really fun to do as an actor,
especially because you know that it's gonna translate well onscreen.
BENSON: When we are preparing our shot list, or storyboards,
or whatever it is we're preparing for in pre-production,
we literally work with blueprints, photographs,
and sometimes models of these sets.
So there's not huge surprises when you walk in.
MOORHEAD: When we were developing our shots
and doing the shot list and the planning,
we wrote, you know, a dense, roughly 12-page document
about general visual approach.
And then an hour-long video cut together of different examples
of things that work, things that don't,
here's what we're gonna do and not do,
'cause the visual style is different from Season 1.
And then, our cinematographer, Isaac Bauman,
took that and made a 700-page book
of not just references, typed out book,
of the entire visual language of the show down to the smallest lights.
ISAAC BAUMAN: When you're designing the look of a project,
the way to make it look stylish and stylized
and have integrity, is actually to do as little range as possible.
Create as little diversity as possible in the amount of looks you're doing
so that the project takes on a cohesive whole.
However, you want it to do something different
with all these different time periods we're visiting
because it was motivated, you know.
We couldn't ignore that motivation.
So, before we started shooting the first episode,
we mapped all this out, every single time period, every set.
Everything was calibrated to stand out
and be specific and motivated by the environment that it was in.
But also by prepping so far in advance,
we made sure that every single thing felt like a cohesive slice of the pie.
First season of Loki, they asked me to come in and help out
in post-production on the visual effects.
I fell in love with the show. So when the opportunity came up,
and said, "Hey, how do you feel about doing an episode on Season 2?"
I'm like, I jumped at the chance.
The irony is that Episode 2 has the least amount of visual effects
in the entire season.
And the number of times a lot of the crew came up, it's like,
"You know, it's weird you're doing the show
"that has the least amount of visual effects."
It's like, "Yeah, that occurred to me."
Episode 2 is very much a kind of a conspiracy
and kind of a, like a thriller-esque thing
where they have to find Sylvie,
they need answers, what happened at the End of Time.
When I first read the script,
it kind of felt something, you know, plays out like The French Connection,
from a lot of the '70s movies where you stay in the perspective of the characters
as they work to solve the puzzle.
Dan will say, "I saw this thing that you did in Episode 1,
"I remember this thing you did in the table read for Episode 2.
"I don't want you to forget it. Let's do it in take three.
"Let's do two straight,
"then that curveball one where you're playing around."
-Zaniac. -What about it?
-I wanna know about it. -Oh, come on.
-Please. -You don't care about my movie.
Brad, I saw the poster. It looked scary.
It's not. It's not.
It's not scary. It's elevated thriller, all right?
-It is? -It's cinema.
Like you would know anything about that.
DELEEUW: Even though it's,
conceptually, it's, you know, it's like TV,
in the sense that you have showrunners,
the studio is guiding the scripts, but when you're brought in,
you're instantaneously brought into the room with everyone else,
where the scripts are being developed,
the writers and the producers are there,
and our other directors on this season,
you're all collaborating on everybody's episode.
We workshop the script, and we'll have Tom there
and we'll have Owen come in and Sophia come in,
everybody gives their perspective on the characters,
and it keeps elevating the script and elevating the script...
And it's always the idea, you know, that the best idea wins.
A little over the top, don't you think, all the shadow play?
I thought it was spot on.
I've been on this team, on this Loki ride, for quite a while now.
Since fall of 2019.
That's when we started prep on Season 1.
And so, when this season came about, started back up,
they asked me if I wanted to participate in the writers' room,
which was a huge honor and a lot of fun, and...
In some ways, it made sense because so much of the show
comes out of the world in which it's set.
Out of that opportunity
came this even cooler opportunity to direct Episode 3,
which is very different than the rest of the season, I can say.
DI MARTINO: Kasra is doing these, like, huge long takes
of really intricate scenes,
where he's doing just, like, these big swooping, like, oners almost,
which is really cool to do because it's a challenge.
You can really get into the flow of it when you're not cutting all the time.
So we have different styles, okay? I'm not sightseeing.
You're a man of action, which is fine.
I take a more slow, deliberate, cerebral approach
because I see everything.
FARAHANI: The decision for this episode to be set in the World's Fair
predates my involvement with the project,
but I think it's sort of a very distinct and iconoclastic setting.
Also, it's just a very unlikely place
to find the next Variant of Kang.
I mean, if they're here, we'll find 'em.
If they're here.
Only one way to find out.
FARAHANI: So this is the Midway Plaisance.
Some people refer to it almost as the amusement park
or the gift shop of the World's Fair.
And the Midway was sort of the more recreational part of it
where there were exhibitions from different parts of the world
with a more accessible format to working-class people.
How great is this Ferris wheel?
(CHUCKLES) Cut.
As you can see, there's blue screens on both ends of the set.
There will be set extension.
But we were able to create quite a good size chunk of it.
And you'll see there's Cairo, Egyptian exhibition,
and there's a Chinese village,
and a Norwegian longhouse structure,
where there are the important statues of the Norse gods,
from which Loki has been excluded.
You know, sometimes I forget that you're one of them.
You are one of them. Blows my mind.
MARTIN: Coming into Season 2,
we knew we wanted to use He Who Remains
and a Variant of He Who Remains in some form.
But we wanted to subvert expectations with that
and not have that be the straight line that people might expect.
So when we see Jonathan there on that stage,
there is He Who Remains
and it's a totally different version of him.
Don't be shocked
when I tell you
that time is the future of...
energy.
He's a brilliant scientist,
but he's kind of born into the wrong time.
And, so, maybe someday, he'll become He Who Remains.
He'll become that dangerous, formidable person.
But right now, he's kind of this likeable character.
We're doing really great here.
We are here in great Chicago.
My name is Victor Timely.
Time is everything.
FARAHANI: In terms of the Loom itself,
this is essentially the prototype
of the Temporal Loom that ultimately
is at the core of the TVA.
And the idea is that Victor Timely's innovation
in concert with the information he got from the TVA Handbook,
which was filled with O.B.'s writings,
and it's through that process that he arrived at this prototype Loom.
My Temporal Loom
inverts the temporal decay of the electricity flowing through it,
lowering its entropy and gathering it
into fine, organized threads of...
power!
FARAHANI: And in the case of this Victorian-era one,
the idea is that it's weaving strands of energy
because this one is focused on refining the efficiency
of electrical output.
Whereas the one in the TVA applies the same sort of idea
to strands of time.
So there's a similar kind of visual language
between this Loom and the one in the TVA,
but this one is rendered in materials
and construction methods from the Victorian era.
All science is fiction
until it's fact!
Mr. Timely. A moment, please.
(STAMMERS) Of course.
We need to talk about your future.
MOORHEAD: Gugu completely understood where we were trying to bring Renslayer.
She could've easily fallen into villain status and instead is a human being.
You're the one who sided with a Loki over me.
Don't play the teamwork card on me now.
There is a really easy way to take Renslayer that is one-dimensional,
which is, she wants power, and that's it.
We just pretty strongly felt like what it really was is,
she has been done wrong and she genuinely has a desire
to bring stability to the TVA, which is important.
So she is an antagonist, but I don't think she's a villain.
-Miss Minutes? -MISS MINUTES: Yeah?
-This is your moment. -ROBBER BARON: Get him!
-Boo! (LAUGHS) -(CROWD SCREAMING)
TOWNSEND: Miss Minutes is coming back so we're gonna be seeing her quite a bit,
which is gonna be lovely, to work with her.
When we can get her out of her trailer. She can be quite temperamental.
Well, even before the TVA or her, you created me.
And we worked together at the End of Time.
I'm here because I know what a great man you can become.
EMMA MCCLEAVE: On set, they shoot Miss Minutes with a lamp.
And we have an on-set reader who does a really great job
working with the actors to create the scene.
We then go away, myself and the director Kasra,
and we cut a version of the scene that works.
My assistant editors go in and do their best
to comp in a version of Miss Minutes.
And then we recorded Tara's ADR.
So then you refine the scene again.
And you hope that the animation is all going to come together.
Rising Sun Pictures did Miss Minutes this season, she's phenomenal.
So, original orange Miss Minutes,
they revamped her a little bit
to give her a bit of a different rig
so that she had more expression and all that stuff.
Just watch.
PAUL: Then there's black and white Miss Minutes that we see in Episode 3,
and initially, Kasra, who directed that episode,
wanted her to be fully 2D cel-animated.
And we could have done it but it would've been prohibitively expensive.
So we asked, "Is there any way that you can rig this
"so it looks like a 2D cel-animated figure?"
Better?
PAUL: And they were able to do it and she looks fantastic.
With all your powers and all your abilities,
you just kept me as your thing.
Your computer, your toy.
Instead of what I could have been.
Your girl.
FARAHANI: This is the Temporal Core control room.
So, this set is very much influenced
by mid-century European and Eastern European power plants,
along with some kind of NORAD-type environments.
As you walk through the containment corridor,
you're walking through a series of three to four-foot thick doors.
And then ultimately, when you get to the main door into the control room,
you know, the threshold for that door is about nine feet.
And then you get in here,
and as you go into the control room airlock
and you go through the airlock door,
there's another 8-foot deep
concrete threshold that you have to move through.
The idea is that what is outside this window
is the most awesome force,
something akin to a nuclear blast or a volcano.
Suit up, get down the gangway as fast as you can,
load the Multiplier, hit the green button, launch it and get back.
DI MARTINO: It was actually really great shooting in here with everyone,
that we did a lot of days in this room.
We did a lot of different versions of the same events
over and over again, almost like Groundhog Day.
Hit the green button.
That's right. Now launch it.
That's it, you've done it. Get back, get back. Go, go!
There were some really fun times
when we were all going a little bit stir-crazy.
Cabin fever, sort of, you know, on the edge.
Yes.
I've spent so many days in this room.
We shot this scene,
A version, B version, C, D, E, F, G, H,
I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P...
And I would go home and I would dream about it
and have to come to set and do it all over again.
And then go home and dream about it.
(CHUCKLES) And then come to set and do it all over again.
I mean, I will always remember the Temporal Core.
With the Loom, there was quite a bit of R&D.
It was more to make sure the thing looked real.
Art department was incredible.
They were the ones that started the concept work.
And then we handed it off in pre-production
to a vendor called Trixter, who works out of Germany.
And they started to try and make this thing function.
Initially, it was supposed to be the size of a moon.
But the distance for it to be how big we see it in screen
would've had to have been so extremely far away
that it wouldn't have been functional
in a way for us to try and fix it.
Benson and Moorhead were really big on us having a lot of color in there.
They wanted to see, like, the full spectrum.
That Temporal Core lighting setup
was absolutely massive, it was the biggest we did in the whole season.
You'll see as the characters move through that space,
rainbow patterns slide over them.
You've got about five minutes.
BAUMAN: And that was actually incredibly difficult to figure out.
The first issue is, no existing LED unit is capable
of making a rainbow with delineated sections of color.
So, the lighting department, my gaffer Mark Taylor,
worked with Chris Townsend, the VFX supervisor,
to develop with VFX tools, a graphic design rainbow
that we had printed on these tiny little plates,
it looks like a petri dish microscope slide-sized little plate.
And then those, we slid into these units
that are designed mostly for theatrical, like,
moving LED, point source, spotlight type of units.
And the light pushed through the plate
and projected, in effect, a rainbow on the scene.
However, what we discovered was, what we put in the computer
and what was printed on the plate
and what it looked like when the light was shining through it
were all completely different things.
So we kind of had to work backwards from,
"All right, well, this design looks like this
"when it's actually being projected."
It looks nothing like the design.
So we had to make the designs look all weird
to get it to where it looked normal in real life, on set.
So it took all... It not only took all ten weeks of prep,
but it took, you know, the first ten weeks of shooting
before we had moved into the Temporal Core control room set,
to trial-and-error this thing.
Trust me. If you stop, you die.
All right.
Here we go.
CHRISTINE WADA: The main objective with that suit was,
"Just how cumbersome can we possibly make this thing?"
Believe it or not, that is not an easy thing to accomplish in this scale.
You're good.
WADA: Just getting the materials to work out,
for instance, I R&D'd many different treatments to the fabric
to get sort of a retro look to this canvas,
but yet, a protective quality.
And I thought I found it with a latex
that we would spray onto this canvas.
And about three weeks in, we discovered that it was turning pink
because the latex was reacting to UV.
Then we had to try to find UV-protective...
Anyhow, the whole thing had to get ditched.
We had to do another, we had already R&D'd this whole process.
But for the Temporal Core suit, it peels away under temporal energy
and there was a...
A layer underneath that was... had this reflective quilted quality.
Just figuring out how to get the, you know,
hundreds of yards of quilting through these machines,
we had to build these special stretchers for it,
so it's just endless amount of engineering feats for that.
And then also, just how does somebody wear that much weight and scale
and not look like a walkabout costume?
You think it's gonna be really easy to make something cumbersome for an actor,
and then you realize it's actually not that easy. (CHUCKLES)
BENSON: There were definitely certain trips out to the Loom launcher
that were meant to be comedic in how darkly funny they were.
Then there was other ones where we're just
drawing out the tension as much as we could.
MOORHEAD: We knew that the more cumbersome the journey,
the more painful it would be.
Kind of thinking about when, like in Gravity,
when someone's reaching for something and because they don't have the inertia,
it's physically impossible for them to try harder
to reach something, it was like that.
(GRUNTS)
Be brave. You're being so brave.
TOWNSEND: We've got several scenes
where we have characters that walk out along the gangway
towards the Temporal Loom in order to fix it,
or solve a certain problem, and as a consequence,
one of the things that happens when characters walk out there
is that they get affected by the temporal energy.
And if they're not careful,
and if the temporal energy is too strong,
they will start, their suits will start degrading and spaghettifying.
So, almost all the shots you see
have got some visual effects on the suit itself.
And we are destroying them, degrading them in-camera,
and we're pulling threads out in this sort of a spaghettification manner
in a similar way that we've used in other temporal, sort of, visualizations.
So it's something that's been a really interesting process,
trying to find that language
that sort of fits in with the idea of it decaying.
We shot everyone at 40 frames a second
so that they move just a little bit more slowly.
We got great performances from Owen and from Jonathan,
who were all in the suits.
Push the green button!
Sometimes, the suits are all CG in some of the shots,
but we tried to use the real suits as much as possible.
Yes!
Pumpkins.
What do I do?
It's the Sacred Timeline, or nothing.
It's not enough to protect the Sacred Timeline, Loki.
Even down there, it's full of death and destruction
and injustice.
Do you really wanna be the god who takes away everyone's free will
so you can protect that?
But what good is free will if everyone's dead?
And who are you to say we can't die trying?
Who are you to decide we can't die fighting?
The thing that Tom said to me very, very early in Season 2
was if this is about Loki becoming the best version of himself,
you can't become the best version of yourself
without accepting your past.
Which means accepting all of it, warts and all.
And there was an interesting thing of, like, to become a true, true, true hero,
a guy who is never going to benefit from any of these choices he makes...
He's gonna get that throne he always wanted,
but it's not in the way that he ever anticipated.
He wants to be with his friends, he can't.
To make a true sacrificial play,
he has got to truly understand who he is.
Loki, what are you doing?
I know what I want.
I know what kind of god I need to be...
for you.
For all of us.
WRIGHT: And when he steps into the Temporal Loom and sacrifices himself,
I think that's a moment that's been coming for Loki,
that we haven't seen.
We wanted to truly have him step up
from lowercase-G god, to capital-G God.
There was a draft of the script
of the very end, the very end.
Something wasn't sitting right with both of us about it.
And the issue was, this draft didn't have Loki destroying the Loom.
He saved the Loom from imploding and then ascended the throne.
We all knew something was up, we didn't know what.
'Cause it was like, he's trying to save the Loom,
he gets the throne, all of this.
But the problem was, is that he didn't have the sacrifice
and we realized, why doesn't he destroy the Loom
and then have to take over the Loom's massive responsibility?
He doesn't get anything out of it.
It seems so obvious now, it seems like exactly the right choice.
But that was a watershed moment in the development of it,
when we realized Loki needs to destroy and become the Loom.
TOWNSEND: We see his normal clothes shed off
and reveal his final Loki costume
and his horns begin to grow back.
We've already shot Tom climbing these stairs
and ascending to what will become, effectively, his throne,
as he then holds onto time and holds it all together.
That was a pretty epic sort of moment.
WADA: Tonally, that was a very tough costume to land on
because it needed to have a monastic quality,
but he also has a history of wanting the throne, to be a king.
And he's kind of positioning himself to be
looking over everything in the manner of a king, but humble.
And humbled by the weight of that responsibility,
so it's just figuring out how that costume could say all those things.
-The grand finale. -The grand finale of Loki.
-Yeah. -Seasons 1 and 2.
It's resonant, it's moving, 'cause he's been through so much.
And so much struggle and so much suffering, and...
So many questions.
And to sort of come back, it feels like it's
a reacceptance of something.
Or a redefinition of himself, somehow.
And I think it's interesting that from the beginning,
we always talked, I mean, from November,
-we talked about it being organic. -Yeah.
-And it is that organic part of Loki. -Yeah.
-It's real. It's a toss-up. -It's very real.
It's an inter... It's the inside on the outside.
WADA: It is. Yes.
HIDDLESTON: So, what I love about it is, it's familiar in its colors
and in its shape,
but it's new in its humility.
-So, gone are the... -WADA: Armors.
HIDDLESTON: ...the armor and the metal and the breastplates.
-It's kind of a hybrid. -It's more vulnerable.
It is. And it's a hybrid of, like,
sort of a king and... a monk.
-Right? -Yeah. Yeah.
These are... These are the robes of someone
who might be dedicated to a purpose
-beyond the self. -WADA: Right.
HIDDLESTON: And these are the garments of purpose and practice.
WADA: And weight. HIDDLESTON: And weight.
-Yeah. -WADA: Yeah.
HIDDLESTON: Was it Mobius who says in Episode 6,
"Sometimes purpose is more burden than glory.
"You choose your burden."
And so, this is him accepting that mantle.
WRIGHT: The first ten years of movies with Loki was about the glory.
He was a villain, he was chasing a throne.
This season is about him learning that his glorious purpose
is to carry the burden of everyone else.
He's embracing the caring person that he's turned into
through these two seasons,
but he's also embracing his past
and his status as an Asgardian god
to hold everything together and to save his friends.
He's giving us a chance.
His magical power as a demigod
is enhanced because he realizes that this...
this authority he has over coordinating and managing time
is, in fact, where the story ends.
And it's his only resistance against the grand plan of He Who Remains.
There was a huge opportunity here
to show a character evolve
from being petty to being someone who sacrifices for others
and feels the value of that.
And to tell that story, especially today, was a gift.
I think what was also really important
is that the sacrifice weren't just a superhero sacrifice,
it was one where he never even gets to see the benefits of it.
He doesn't get to save his friends and then hang out with them.
It is a pure sacrifice.
He is Atlas at the End of Time holding it all together.
And then that came from wanting to tell a story
that had, like, a mythic weight to it,
that's befitting the Norse mythology that all of this is built on.
I remember,
over two years ago, I put this on for Season 1.
And Season 1 felt like a new beginning
because we were stripping Loki of everything that was familiar to him,
it was taking him away from Asgard and Thor and Odin.
A new beginning, a new story, a new chapter.
And wearing this jumpsuit and hoping
that the audience would accept and be inspired by our new story.
No matter how hard you work, there's always that sense of uncertainty.
You think, "Well, I hope they love it,
"and I hope they are as excited and interested in this new idea as I am."
And I feel so fortunate and so grateful to the audience
'cause people really seem to be interested
in the ideas and the characters and the world and the TVA
and the performances and all these great new actors in the MCU.
So, my feeling is one of immense gratitude and,
to be completely honest, profound excitement.