Tom Hiddleston on Mobius, Loki, and Queer Identity

This article contains frank discussion of the Loki series premiere, “Glorious Purpose.” If you’re not caught up, now is the time to leave. 

When Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff and Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson set sail for their Disney+ shows, they had some familiar company in the shape of Paul Bettany’s Vision and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes. But as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki hops out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline and into his adventures with the Time Variance Authority, he does so without another previously established Marvel companion along for the ride. 

As we see in the series premiere, the defining relationship for Loki in this show will likely be with the character of Mobius, played by Owen Wilson. Head writer Michael Waldron has described theirs as a love relationship, though not a romantic one. Hiddleston spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast about the love story between Mobius and Loki as well as the obligation he feels around his character’s canonically queer and gender-fluid identity. You can hear the full interview here, or read some key excerpts below. 

When director Taika Waititi was tasked with reinventing the character of Thor for his film Thor: Ragnarok, he did so by stripping away all the things that had previously defined the god of thunder. He cut Thor’s hair, broke his hammer, killed off Thor’s buddies, and destroyed his home of Asgard. In a 2017 interview, though, Waititi revealed that he was told not to mess with Loki. The character was too popular; Marvel wanted to keep him as he was. 

But here, in his own Disney+ series, Loki is getting the treatment his brother Thor got in Ragnarok. “Thor is nowhere to be seen, and Asgard is very far away,” Hiddleston says. “There are no Avengers near at hand. He’s even stripped of his status and his power. What is left if you strip Loki of all the things that are familiar to him? What remains? That’s for him to discover as much as the audience.”

Helping Loki through this journey of self-discovery is Mobius, who gives Hiddleston’s character a healthy dose of psychiatric analysis in the series premiere. Mobius, Hiddleston says, is uniquely positioned to help Loki through his first story without his brother Thor by his side. “The thing that was so new and fresh for me was that Mobius is a character who is emotionally detached from Loki’s emotional turmoil and all the tricks that Loki tries to play in,” Hiddleston says. “[The things that] work on everybody else, provocation or manipulation, just don’t land with Mobius.”

While Mobius is occasionally harsh with Loki, there are also some kernels of compassion there. Hiddleston sees Mobius as “delighted,” with an “academic curiosity,” about having Loki in front of him. “They’re both very clever and both trying to outsmart each other, and realize very early on they need each for different reasons,” he says. “That’s a feeling that’s unusual and in needing each other, they might have to try to trust each other, which is going to be very difficult.” Loki head writer Michael Waldron has compared their relationship to the one shared by Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can. 

There’s a temptation to slide Mobius into an almost paternal role. He’s capable of giving Loki the approval Loki was dying to receive from his father, Odin. There’s a moment in the premiere where Loki insists he’s very smart, and Mobius genially agrees: “I know you are.” Hiddleston says that moment is “destabilizing” for Loki, who “finds himself in the presence of someone who is confronting him with who he is, who he might be, seemingly without judgment.”