After a year of speaking to the press for Marvel Studios projects, Michael Waldron has mastered the no-answer answer. Frankly, it’s an admirable skill. Especially when you’re doing Emmy-centric press as the head writer and an executive producer for the first season of the Disney Plus smash series “Loki” while attempting to avoid revealing anything insightful on season two or the upcoming “Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness,” which he also wrote the screenplay for. Who knew media interviews would be more challenging than figuring out divergent multiverses?
READ MORE: “Loki” Season 2: Marvel Hires “Moon Knight” Directors Justin Benson And Aaron Moorhead
Already an Emmy-winner for producing “Rick and Morty,” Waldron was the head writer on what is both the most popular Marvel Studios television series to date. That was partially due to the incredible cast featuring the returning Tom Hiddleston as the title character, Sophia Di Martino as the alternate Loki, Sylvie, Owen Wilson as Mobius and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna. It was also thanks to Waldron’s collaboration with director Kate Herron, who helmed the entire six-episode first season. Herron is moving on to different projects and won’t return, but can her replacements, “Moon Knight” helmers Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, keep that incredible aesthetic for season two?
“Well, I mean, look, what Kate did with Kasra Farahani our production designer, Christine Wada, our costume designer, and the whole crew and establishing the look of the show, I mean, what can you say other than it’s just like, it is utterly spectacular,” Waldron says. “It doesn’t look like TV. It couldn’t have looked more premium. So what they did was amazing. Benson and Morehead, I know those guys. They’re great. They’re brilliant in their own right. You know, I think they’re going to come in and they’re going to do what everybody on this project does, which is to elevate, you know? Then they’ll take what was great about it and fit it with their own awesome instincts and everything and hopefully will make something even better.”
During the course of our interview, Waldron explains how he had to find out the details of “Avengers: Endgame” months before its release, keeping Hiddleston in the loop, the biggest challenges in the writer’s room, and more.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on a great year, busy year, and highly anticipated year.
Michael Waldron: Thank you. Thank you. Very busy year. Yeah. Geez. It’s crazy.
It is. Let’s talk about Loki. How did it come your way? How did you even get involved in the development of the series?
Very fortuitously. I was working on “Rick and Morty” season four. We were kind of gearing up to do season five. I was kind of happily moving along there, and I had just written a time travel feature that had landed on The Black List. And that made its way over to an executive at Marvel, Stephen Broussard, who was heading up the Loki show, which was going to involve a time travel element. And it came to me as Marvel is looking to do a series about Loki with Tom Hiddleston, about Loki traveling through time. Would you be interested? I said, “Absolutely.” I love Loki more than that. I just thought the opportunity, to have a six-hour TV show with Tom Hiddleston is a dream come true, truthfully. And yeah, I was just kind of off to the races from there. I was lucky only in that I just spent some time really working in the time travel space kind of on my own. So my brain was dialed into all of that crap.
When you talked to Marvel how much of Loki’s premise or storyline was already set up?
I remember I pulled off into a parking garage in Burbank, so Kevin Wright, our producer, could call me. And this is in November before “Endgame” came out. So he could call me and tell me what happened in “Endgame,” so I could know. Because I was like, “How is Loki alive in the show?” How was there even a show? And so he called me, and he was like, “So, ‘Endgame’ is a time heist.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” And it’s perfect. I’m in a parking garage. I was like, “Somebody’s going to shoot me.” So they had the idea that Loki was going to escape with the Infinity Stone and land at the TVA and run afoul of the TVA. But that was really it. What that meant, what kind of adventure he went on, even what the TVA was, as an entity within the MCU and how we would adapt that from the comics, were all up for grabs. And so that’s when I came in and kind of pitched this “Blade Runner”-esque story about Loki being pulled in by the TVA to catch a variant of himself.
Which ended up being Sylvie.
Yes, yes. Who he then develops this unlikely relationship with.
Had they told you He Who Remains/future Kang or whatever is behind the TVA? Or was that inherent to it?
No, that was not in there. I brought to them the idea of Sylvie Lushton, a version of The Enchantress, which we kind of fused into an idea of a variant Loki. And then it became clear early on because one of the first things we had to do in the writer’s room was define the actual rules and nature of time travel in this show. And what does the TVA do and why do they do it? And it became clear to us that according to kind of the rules of time travel, they’d been laid out in “Endgame” and according to the rules of time travel that made sense to me and that we wanted to run within the show, really, time travel was kind of the multiverse as … It’s like time travel. We were like, “We’re really making a multiverse show, more than we’re making a time travel show.” The TVA shifted to like, “O.K., these guys are actually guarding against a multiverse.” And so that’s when He Who Remains is just kind of an old creepy guy in the comics, and I pushed and Marvel was very receptive to it, the idea, this should be a variant of Kang. Because I knew Kang was coming down the pipe as a villain in the MCU and it just felt too delicious to not have him intertwined in our time travel story somehow. And so then it was just been coming upon us to justify his role in this place, but Marvel was very supportive of all that.
Was there any moment during the sort of process of writing the show where you’re like, “O.K., we have to nail down what this series is about, where we’re going”?
I mean, there were many moments like that, many of them which turned out to be false victories in writers’ rooms. Certainly knowing that it was Kang at the end of it all, that the Timekeepers were fake, was a big one. But weirdly enough,one of the biggest ones was figuring out what Sylvie was doing, actually how she was hiding from the TVA, just because that felt like such a fun, clever bit of Sci-Fi that I hadn’t seen before, that it’s, “Oh, what a cool way to hide from the time police, you would go relive apocalypses over and over.” And that gave us the climax. That really gave us the backbone of episode two, all of episode three. Episode four is all about trying to figure that out. In episode five, even sort of plays on ideas. So, for me, that was the idea. I remember that light bulb moment in the writers’ room, being like, “Oh shit, this show’s going to be good because that’s a big, cool idea.”
Obviously, the Loki that appears at the beginning of the series is more flawed. He’s from a time when he hasn’t gone through everything that he had experienced before he died in “Infinity War.” Was it important for you guys to get him to a different place than before his character died? Was that something you talked about with Tom?
Well, yeah. I mean, we talk about everything with Tom and tried to really be in lockstep with him on what the journey was. To me, the goal of the first episode was always to accelerate this version of Loki’s character growth, to a point where he is up to, and in fact, beyond the growth of the Loki we saw be killed by Thanos. And so that’s what was exciting, the device of Loki watching his own death, that this is a way for this character to see how his MCU self was meant to arc out. But then it’s like, “All right. So that’s who this guy was. That’s this character the audience remembers. Now we’re going to take him on a totally different journey.” Because what I didn’t want [was[ the audience to feel like they were spending an entire season with just a replacement, just a replacement Loki. It’s like, this guy is aware of that growth and is continuing a version of that journey was how I wanted to do it.
When you were pitched the show was there always the expectation that it was more than one season? Because it is one of the few Marvel projects so far that does end on an actual cliffhanger. Was that always in the cards?
No. Originally, I mean, I really conceive and wrote a lot of the show kind of operating as though it would just be one season, which is the best way to do these things. And frankly, this is how I would’ve operated, even if I had known we were going to get a second season. I think it’s important for each season to really stand alone as its own thing. And so, yeah, I mean, it became clear, even as we were making it and still kind of refining episode six, that it felt like hey, this cast, this world is great and wow, there’s a lot more gas left in the tank. And yeah, there is certainly more story to tell here. And so that’s when we sort of shifted some things.
So, I’m assuming there was originally a different ending.
A million different endings. There’s always a different ending. But there was the original one season-ending, which I guess is just for me.
Just for you. Were you happy though with the way you guys did eventually end it?
Totally, totally. That’s great. A lot of that work was done in tandem with Eric Martin who was there on set. Because I was over lockdown in London, making “Dr. Strange” in the pandemic, and Eric and I wrote the finale together, and he deserves a lot of the credit for that great final moment.
I know that Marvel doesn’t have the showrunner credits, but essentially you’re the showrunner in many ways on the show. Was it frustrating to not be there at the end, for your baby while you’re somewhere in London shooting something else?
Well, fortunately, I actually did get to be there at the very end. I was able to come over for the last week and see Jonathan Major’s performance as Kang and be there for the final day. But no, we were actually in pretty good shape heading into production and Kate Heron, the amazing work she did speaks for itself, but she just … I knew the show was only going to get elevated as it became hers in production. And so we had a great working relationship, and I couldn’t be happier with how it all came together.
Well, taking any competitive aspect out of this, with over 270,000 people voting, your series is the most loved out of all the Marvel series so far on IMDB. Does the fan reaction mean anything to you? Is that something that you’re satisfied with? Were you worried about it while you were shooting the show?
I mean, yeah. Of course. Geez. You want people to love stuff. Of course, that means so much. I hope that people like it. When you dive into this world, you know that you’re making something for sort of the biggest audience possible, not because of anything I did. It’s because the MCU is what it is. You’re taking a baton and telling a chapter of a story that is utterly beloved and consumed by so many people around the world and the expectations are really high. And I think it was always our hope to set our own expectations for the show even higher than what the fans and the viewers might be. I said to Marvel in my very first pitch, “What if the ‘Loki’ show was the best show anybody’s ever seen?” And I really meant that. And I think that’s how I approached it. That’s how Kate approached it. And that’s how the whole team did. And that is how you make something. You don’t always get things to coalesce like that. But I think, in this case, we did, everybody really gave it their all.
You were writing the second “Dr. Strange” while this was going on. Could you have written that movie without making Loki? And can “Loki “season two happen if “Dr. Strange 2” hadn’t happened? Are they all intertwined?
The headaches I have are probably intertwined. I mean, it’s all intertwined and it’s all stands alone. Like a great comic universe, I think that one thing certainly informs the other. You’re going to have a better time watching the next chapter of an MCU story if you’ve seen the stuff before it. But also, hopefully, even if you’ve never if you’ve walked in off the street, you’ll still have a blast. It should be good enough that it stands on its own.
Obviously, it must be locked at this point. Are you happy with how “Dr. Strange” came together?
I am. Yeah. Yeah. I am. I’m really proud of it.
You are very good with no spoiler answers. I’m so impressed.
A lot of practice, man. A lot of practice. Look, that was “Dr. Strange.” That feels like one long pandemic lockdown home video for me. To get to work with Sam Raimi and that crew and that cast. The circumstances under which we made that movie, you can’t help, but get incredibly close. And so, yeah. I think we made something we’re all really proud of.
That’s awesome. I know that Kate is not coming back for season two of “Loki” and you’ve got the new directing team coming on board. Do you want the aesthetic of the series to be the same? Or are you expecting Benson and Moorhead to take it in a different direction?
Well, I mean, look, what Kate did with Kasra Farahani our production designer, Christine Wada, our costume designer, and the whole crew and establishing the look of the show, I mean, what can you say other than it’s just like, it is utterly spectacular. It doesn’t look like TV. It couldn’t have looked more premium. So what they did was amazing. Benson and Moorhead, I know those guys. They’re great. They’re brilliant in their own right. You know, I think they’re going to come in and they’re going to do what everybody on this project does, which is to elevate, you know? Then they’ll take what was great about it and fit it with their own awesome instincts and everything and hopefully will make something even better.
Is the goal another six-episode sort of arc, or could it potentially be longer for season two?
Time will tell.
“Loki” season one is available on Disney+