‘Loki’ head writer Michael Waldron on creating a show ‘befitting such a great, nuanced character’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
You could say that Michael Waldron had to find the glorious purpose in “Loki” when he joined the show as head writer and executive producer. After all, you could really do anything with the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) after he escaped the Battle of New York with the Tesseract during the time heist in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” setting off a new timeline.
“For me, it was first and foremost, this had to be a Loki show,” Waldron tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video above). “We had to focus on the character. You could do as cool of a time travel plot as you wanted, but it had to be a show befitting such a great, nuanced character and the tremendous performer who plays him, so my first focus was really on Loki and how could we tell a new story with him. How could we take advantage of the fact that here we have a blockbuster movie villain that we’re gonna get to spend six hours with?”
That involved forcing the shapeshifting trickster of 2012 to look inward after he’s captured by the Time Variance Authority, especially when he comes face to face with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), one of the many Loki variants out there. But once Waldron and his writers had the general story in place, there was still one major element they had to establish rules for: time travel. “We banged our heads against the whiteboards. We took probably two full weeks to figure out the time travel logic of the show, which is a long time to dedicate to not breaking the story of a specific episode,” Waldron recalls. “That required being students of ‘Endgame’ and the time travel logic laid out there … but we had the benefit of the TVA is above everything that is happening in ‘Endgame.’ We got to sort of make up our own rules and everything and that was really a testament to my brilliant writing staff … everyone coming in with different ideas, drawing a lot of squiggly lines on whiteboards arguing over ‘what is time?’ Is time something only happens once? Is it something that happens over and over? What is a multiverse versus what is time travel? And by the end of that, we had a shared institutional knowledge of what time travel would be in this world.”
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The Emmy winner, who wrote the upcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” used a “cheat” in Miss Minutes, an anthropomorphic animated clock voiced in an off-kilter cheerful Southern accent by Tara Strong to explain some of the time travel rules for viewers. “I think that was me writing the pilot and feeling almost wanting to handwave my way through a first draft, almost like a placeholder, like we’ll drop a Mr. DNA sort of thing in here and maybe we’ll figure out a more graceful way to explain this stuff later,” Waldron explains. “It actually ended up being perfect and very true to probably how the TVA would explain this. That’s the work that Tara Strong did, bringing that character to life and Kate [Herron, the director] and the whole team rendering her artistically. Obviously it only works if it looks cool and sounds cool.”
Waldron also turned to Miss Minutes when the “Loki” writing staff had to submit pre-recorded acceptance speeches in case they won at the Writers Guild of America Awards last month. The show was nominated for drama series and new series but lost to “Succession” and “Hacks,” respectively. Afterward, Waldron tweeted one of their submitted speeches, which featured Miss Minutes hilariously roasting the “Loki” writers and saying, “You’re actually on a branched timeline now. ‘Succession’ was supposed to win.” The idea for the speech came from writer Tom Kauffman, who suggested it’d be funny if Miss Minutes accepted but was “indignant about the about the way she was portrayed on the show.”
Congrats to Succession and Hacks on their WGA awards! Here’s the speech we submitted in case we won. #Loki pic.twitter.com/pK3VDbs5y5
— Michael Waldron (@michaelwaldron) March 21, 2022
“I submitted a version where she says ‘Succession’ was supposed to win and I submitted a version where she says ‘Hacks’ was supposed to win. I didn’t post that one, but I did correctly predict who we would lose to in both categories. I’m happy about that,” Waldron quips. “But Tara was awesome. I was glad we were able to put that out there. … We were honored [to lose to them]. I was checking the Gold Derby forums. I was like, ‘All right, what are they saying? Are they saying we have a chance?’”
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