Loki director Kate Herron addresses the big question of fandom incest

Yes, Loki Show director Kate Herron knows your fan theory about the show, the analysis you posted on social media. No, she won’t tell you what she thinks about it, or if you were right.

“I follow all conversations on Twitter,” Herron told Playserver in an interview shortly after. Lokithe season 1 finale. “I don’t always weigh in on them, because I did the show, so they don’t want me to weigh in like,”Really, guys… ‘I think that’s the whole point of art – it should be up for debate and discussion. “

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for season 1 of Loki.]

Loki has been a hit for the Disney Plus streaming service – Episode 6 of the show, the final installment of this season, has reportedly been watched by more households than any of the platform’s MCU Finals at this time. day. The series has been a popular source of guesswork and argument for fans, with a particularly important conversation focusing on whether the budding romance between trickster Asgardian Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and his alternate universe counterpart Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) is a form of incest.

Herron is ready to talk about it. “My interpretation is that they’re both Lokis, but they’re not the same person,” she said. “I don’t see them as a brother and a sister. They have completely different backgrounds […] and I think that’s really important for his character. They sort of have the same role in terms of universe and fate, but they won’t be making the same decisions.

Photo: Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

Herron thematically says that Loki falling in love with Sylvie is an exploration of “self-esteem,” but only in the sense that it is Loki who learns to understand his own motives and integrity. “[The show is] looking at yourself and asking yourself “What makes us us?” Herron said. “I mean, look at all of the Lokis across the show, they’re all completely different. I think there is something beautiful about his romantic relationship with Sylvie, but they are not interchangeable.

Directing the final kiss between the two characters was a complicated process as it had to communicate something about each of them in just a matter of seconds. Herron says the main goal was to create a safe and comfortable environment for Hiddleston and Di Martino, and after that she had to think about how to convey Loki and Sylvie’s conflicting goals at this point.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it? ” she says. “Emotionally, from Sylvie’s point of view, I think it’s goodbye. But it’s always an accumulation of all these feelings. They both grew up through each other over the last few episodes. It was important to me that it didn’t sound like a trap, like she was cheating on him. She obviously does, on the one hand, but I don’t think the kiss is any less sincere. I think she’s in a rough spot, but her feelings are real.

Herron says directing Hiddleston in the scene mostly boiled down to discussing Loki’s speech to Sylvie before the kiss. “It was really important to show this new place for Loki,” Herron said. “In the first episode, he says, ‘I want the throne, I want to rule,’ and in episode 6, he’s not focused on that selfish desire. He just wants her to be okay.

Loki writer and producer Eric Martin recently tweeted that he wished the series could focus more on two of its supporting characters, Mobius M. Mobius, agent of Owen Wilson’s Time Variance Authority, and Ravonna Renslayer of Gugu Mbatha-Raw. “I wanted to explore it more in depth and really see their relationship,” he says, “But the covid got in our way and we just didn’t have time.”

When asked if Loki and Sylvie’s relationship suffered from similar necessary changes, Herron says it’s true that the show’s creators and audiences still don’t know everything Sylvie went through to make her so different. from the original version of Loki from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “We saw her as a child, but she lived for thousands and thousands of years, in fleeing apocalypses,” she says. “I think there is so much more to explore with Sylvie […] You fill in the blanks. You see [her on the planet] Lamentis, and it’s horrible. And you’re like, “Well, what kind of a person would that be, growing up in the apocalypses?” What kind of personality would that give him?

Photo: Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios

Herron says Sylvie’s story actually reminds him of the 1995 movie Jumanji, where a young boy is sucked into a magical board game in 1969, and appears 26 years later as a grown man, played by Robin Williams with typical manic energy. “It’s such a strange reference, but…” she said. “He’s a little boy when he finds himself captive in this game, and when he comes out, it’s obviously a lifetime experience. With Sylvie, it’s the same. She was a child when she had to run away, so she had a very difficult life. I would like to see more. Like Eric said, he’s a rich character, there is so much to explore.

Herron says, however, that during her time on the show, material about Sylvie was added rather than cut – in particular, those scenes of her as a child, kidnapped by TVA. “It was before my time, but I know in the Writers’ Room there were a lot of avenues to explore Sylvie on the run and what her life was like,” Herron says. “I wouldn’t want to talk to those any more, because I wasn’t there when they were discussed. But something wasn’t in there that was important to me – I felt we should see her [history] to VAT. The team and I were talking about how this made perfect sense, because episode 4 is all about twisting the idea that VAT could be good on its head. And so that’s something that came later, once I joined, was seeing her as a child. I think we need to see this, not to fully understand her, but to get a sense of her motivations, why she is so angry with this place.

Speaking more broadly of the series finale, Herron says the later episodes weren’t as heavily referential as the early episodes, which she saw as “a love letter to science fiction.” While early images like the TVA interrogation rooms had specific visual references from past sci-fi, the Episode 6 locations were more drawn from collaborations with the team.

“The idea of ​​the physical timeline being circular, our storyboard artists came up with it,” Herron explains. “I had in the scripts:” We cross space until the end of time “, then me and [storyboard artist Darrin Denlinger] discussed how we could play with the idea of ​​time, while also adding MCU nods. He said to me, ‘What if the timeline is circular?’ I think it’s such a striking image, like the End Times Citadel is the needle of a record player. I just thought it was such a cool image, but it wasn’t necessarily taken from anything. “

Episode 6 focuses heavily on the mysterious figure He Who Remains and his citadel, a space which she says was largely designed by decorator Kasra Farahani. “I remember he brought the art to the Citadel, and I thought it was magnificent,” Herron says. “He said, ‘The Citadel was carved out of a real meteorite,’ which struck me as such an inspired idea. And the office of the One Who Remains is the only part that is finished.

Photo: Marvel Studios

She says there are only a few direct tributes in Episode 6, including the zoom shot in space, which directly referred to a similar footage in Robert Zemeckis.‘ 1997 movie Contact.

“And then I have my Teletubbies reference for Episode 5,” Herron says. “I wanted the Void to look like an overgrown garden, like some kind of forgotten place. And I realized that I had presented it as the British countryside. I remember trying to explain it to ILM, who did the visual effects, and saying, “Oh, you know, it’s like the Teletubbies. They’re just rolling hills, but they last forever. It was actually a pretty useful reference at the end, which is funny.

When asked about his favorite filming memory from the season, Herron says it comes down to Tom Hiddleston who started a physical exertion mania before the takes. “Sometimes he runs around to get in the right frame of mind before performing,” she says. “He does push-ups. You know, you step into an action scene, you want to look like you’re running. And it has become contagious in all the actors. We have so many footage of – I think Jack [Veal] ended up doing it, who plays Kid Loki. I have [shots of] he and Sophia do push-ups and squats, just to get ready. It was so funny to see that echo throughout the cast. I think they all ended up doing these exercises with him at some point. It was so funny. “

“This might be my favorite set story, but honestly it’s not a sweet one,” she adds. “I would say my favorite thing is his enthusiasm. He is a very kind, empathetic person. We were shooting this under pretty difficult circumstances, a lot of people were away from home and isolated, and he brought that warmth, energy and joy to the set every day. And I think it made everyone feel very secure and very connected. I am eternally grateful to him for doing this.