“It’s head spinning” – Executive Producer Kevin Wright on Loki Season 2

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.

Marvel's God of Mischief is finally back on our screens in Loki season 2. Loki came out of the gate strong with a first season in 2021 that still ranks amongst the best of the studio's streaming content to date, offering a rich tapestry of ideas with its time-shattering, multiverse-trotting narrative and the chilling introduction of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors).

Picking up where we left off, Loki is in a state of disarray after the events of the last season; when Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) killed He Who Remains, she unleashed chaos across The Sacred Timeline and time is unravelling. Loki seeks the help of Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) to find Sylvie – who is on the run, being hunted by the TVA – and restore order in the multiverse. Executive producer Kevin S. Wright sat down with FILMHOUNDS to talk about Loki's return, the future of the MCU and what it was like to bring the 80s back to life.

First of all, I want to say congrats on season two because what I've seen so far is incredible. I want to ask how early you know season two is happening and when are you starting to think about the story and where you're going to take it?

With this one, we knew midway through shooting season one. So as we were getting into it, Tom and I were having very loose conversations about where it could go and where that season needed to end so we could tee this up. I would say, properly, we got started during additional photography for season one. At that point, we had seen enough of the first season in the cut to be like “We know what this is and we got something cool here”. And so there wasn't really a break in between. I know it's been two years but we went straight from finishing season one and, by the time it was airing in the Summer of 2021, we were already – myself, Eric Martin, the head writer, and Tom, – starting to build those first, early, early scripts for what season two could be.

And obviously, season one is so highly regarded. You create such a rich world and character and then the way it ends with He Who Remains. What kind of pressure does that set going into Season Two to maintain that level of quality?

It's a good pressure. It can be a little scary. And that's what a lot of those early conversations were about. Do we just come back and try to do the same thing because people like that? Do you play it safe? We mostly just got to a point of “oh, this is really freeing”. The weird things that we wanted to do in season one, you can have a scene that is dramatic with a talking clock. You can have huge character arcs develop out of a person meeting alligator version of themselves. And audiences embrace that stuff. And it made us go “Okay, no, the coolest thing that we have to do for season two is keep pushing it, keep developing it and keep making it surprising”. That's what people liked.

You sort of touched it on there. I think the world of the TVA and time travelling, especially, provide such a rich creative tapestry. What is it like playing in that sandbox and being able to jump between these different times and worlds?

It's super fun. It's also head spinning like the amount of whiteboards and graphs and flowcharts that we've all made are crazy. And they're usually things that we go “only we're ever going to see this”. When it gets on the screen, it has to only be two things. It has to be simple and intriguing. And the second it becomes homework and confusing then we've got to rethink it. So it's really fun. But it's only a tool that you can use to really tell a character story. Multiverse, time travel on its own can become unexciting very quickly if you don't ground it.

Something that I really loved was the McDonald's in Episode Two. I mean, that must be fun. Just getting to go back and do an old-school Mcdonald's.

It's just really nostalgic. And we thought that was a great storytelling device, to tell this yearning that Sylvie is feeling. Obviously, she's never been to a McDonald's. But it was that sense of just… a life, like a small town and a small life. But it was awesome. Like to actually get to work with an archivist who was trying to help us find these things that just don't exist anymore. Yeah, it was really fun.

And He Who Remains is so integral to Loki's character, but also the future of the MCU. What kind of considerations do you have to take into account when you're thinking about how to fold him into Loki's narrative? Or do you even have to consider the grander MCU at all?

I would say no. And what's interesting is because we started developing that in season one, we were always like “I don't think anybody at Marvel realises how big this is” and, of course, Kevin Feige does but it's a nice thing in that we never were really told “alright through this season you have to tie this into this or do this or that”. It was really “you guys have been telling the story for six hours so finish your story and keep telling that story”. So, for us, he is integral to it. And you just keep pulling those threads through. If we left season one here, what does that mean for our characters and the turmoil that they're in and the TVA through this new season.

And finally, I just wanted to ask what Loki's future look like. Are you considering a third season? Is he going to pop up elsewhere? 

We've always talked about the series being two chapters of the same book. Second chapter, we're closing that but there are other books on the shelf for sure. And what we wanted to do with him this season was ask ‘Have we ever seen the best version of Loki yet?' We've seen him be a villain. We've seen him be an antihero. We see toying with heroism during this season but what would the best version of Loki look like? He's probably got to embrace all those aspects and so, certainly, by the end of this, we want to leave him in a place we've never seen before.

Loki Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+