Nearly ten years as Loki: Tom Hiddleston looks back
Tom Hiddleston is opening up about what more than a decade as Loki has meant to him — and it’s more revealing than you might think.
At the Zurich Film Festival, Tom Hiddleston pulled back the curtain on the earliest days of playing Loki , recalling an early sit-down with Marvel boss Kevin Feige that framed the role as a long-term commitment across multiple projects. He said that outlook shaped how he approached the character’s layers over the years—especially Loki’s bruised but persistent ties to family.
“I never expected to be playing the character for this long. 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.”
Speaking to the crowd (via Variety), Hiddleston described feeling grateful for the runway to track Loki from archvillain to complicated antihero, and said he actively searched for the most satisfying way to land the character’s arc after more than a decade on screen.
The long game
Hiddleston’s run spans the early MCU movies through two seasons of his own Disney+ series. Here’s the quick map of where he’s popped up—and how the God of Mischief kept evolving:
- Thor (2011) — Loki’s debut as Thor’s volatile brother
- The Avengers (2012) — full-on Big Bad in the Battle of New York
- Thor: The Dark World (2013) — schemer turned uneasy ally
- Thor: Ragnarok (2017) — reluctant teammate with a heroic streak
- Avengers: Infinity War (2018) — a fatal stand against Thanos
- Avengers: Endgame (2019) — a variant Loki slips away with the Tesseract
- Loki season 1 (2021) on Disney+ — the TVA, timelines and Loki vs. Loki
- Loki season 2 (2023) on Disney+ — a cosmic, character-driven culmination
Asked about what’s next, Hiddleston didn’t tip his hand on future Avengers plans, keeping any potential return under wraps.
Off-screen brothers
He also singled out his bond with Chris Hemsworth as one of the best parts of the job. The two met as fresh faces on Thor and quickly became friends, trading notes as Marvel’s then-new experiment in a connected universe gathered steam. Hiddleston said being fans of those first movies made joining the world feel like a wild, once-in-a-career ride.
For now, Loki’s most recent chapter lives on Disney+, and Hiddleston’s festival comments suggest any future mischief—if it happens—will come when there’s a story worth telling.