Tom Hiddleston Talks Thor: Ragnarok And Loki’s Place In The MCU

Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has been a reliably fun presence across the MCU. Perhaps that’s partly because the franchise is a little lacking when it comes to memorable villains, but a good deal of credit has to go to Hiddleston’s excellent performance and the way he indelibly brought the scheming, mischievous Asgardian to life in the Thor films and in The Avengers. Now, with appearances scheduled in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War and (the as yet untitled) Avengers 4, the actor has given us a peek as to his opinions on the character and his place in the MCU.

Prime among them is the way he’s impressed at how Marvel Studios have woven the Infinity Stones across their movies:

“It’s interesting, in the time since I have played the part, that the value and importance of the Infinity Stones has grown within the Marvel universe in a way I didn’t know when I first made that film. It’s been really interesting, like, while I’ve been off doing other things, um, whether it’s Crimson Peak, or The Night Manager, they talk about Loki’s Scepter.”

For those taking notes, Loki’s Scepter (which was used in his unsuccessful attempt to subjugate Earth) was home to the Mind Stone, which is now ominously lodged in Vision’s forehead. The rest of them are sprinkled liberally throughout the MCU: the Space Stone is the ‘Tesseract,’ which played a key role in Captain America: The First Avenger and is now in the possession of Asgard; the Reality Stone, seen as the ‘aether’ in Thor: The Dark World is currently in the Collector’s Museum; the Power Stone was used in Guardians of the Galaxy and is now in the custody of the Nova Corps; the Time Stone helped Doctor Strange battle Dormammu to a stalemate and is now back in the library at Kamar-Taj; and the Soul Stone is yet to be unveiled.

Hiddleston also touched on Loki’s rather rocky relationship with The Hulk, who unforgettably walloped him into submission and sniffed “puny god.” Now, they’ll be fighting alongside one another, which might be a tiny bit awkward:

“The way I see it is, in The Avengers, Hulk and Loki never really had a conversation. It was more of a physical meeting, an extended ‘group hug,’ shall we say. It’s fun when the two of them re-meet in this. So you’ll see. I don’t wanna spoil it.”

But at the heart of all this is his genuine love for Loki, which has allowed him to take the character from villain to anti-hero:

Loki is a mercurial spirit and the minute you try to define him, he changes shape, he is the shapeshifter in the pantheon, although events in Ragnarok try and inspire to change him forever, I think, but they change for everyone. The goddess of death shows up, and the stakes are high for everybody, so Loki perhaps more than ever, is challenged to define himself in the face of that threat.”

We’ll know precisely what he’s talking about in just a couple of weeks (November 3rd to be precise), when Thor: Ragnarok makes a Hulk-sized smash into theatres.