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It’s all spoilers from here on out!

Top image from The Avengers.

The Avengers

Tom Hiddleston has long been the most loquacious Avengers cast member, and here are some highlights from the latest round of interviews. First up, he explains what writer-director Joss Whedon found so interesting about the character, and why Loki is the right villain to bring all the Avengers together:

Well, I think Joss loves Loki because he loves complexity and the great thing about Loki is that there is almost no ceiling to his complexity as a character. He is a shape-shifter, intelligent, and he has strategic gifts but he also has reservoirs of pain. I think when you have so much color and heroism in a film like The Avengers it needs to be balanced by a degree of pain I think…[Joss] loved all of Loki’s damage and that somewhere at the bottom of Loki’s credentials as a bad guy he is a searching spirit. He is a damaged soul searching for the answers to something. Why does he exist? What is his role in this universe? He isn’t just someone who is evil for the sake of being evil. He has complicated reasons for that. So I think in terms of how The Avengers come together…when you are making a film, there are so many superhero films, and there are so many films about the end of the world, and you have to think, “How can we make this distinctive and unique?” What I think Joss has done so brilliantly is that he has made it about the healing power of being part of a team. So each of The Avengers have their own individual pain. Loki has his own pain too and somehow by bringing them together their pain is eased by being part of a team, which I think is a unique selling point for this particular film.

He also talks some more about just what is motivating the movie’s main villain:

I don’t want to say that it is disconnected from the Loki of Thor. So I think that in thought Loki has a deep need for approval and status. As in, Loki learning that he was Laufey’s bastard son and learning that he had no place in Asgard. He felt unloved, abandoned, and alone. He was abandoned by Odin and that whole family. I think that is still connected to his motivations in The Avengers. I think that any completely delusional fascist in the course of human history has come from the lack of self esteem. So he is just going about in the wrong ways of giving himself power. I mean, that is what all of the villains throughout the history of human race have ever really wanted -– to accumulate power. So somehow in the delusion that power they think it will give them self respect, which it won’t, but Loki thinks that having power will earn him approval and self respect.

Finally, he suggests Loki won’t be making any attempt to blend in while he’s on Earth:

I think that Loki doesn’t particularly care what the humans think about his dress sense. Let’s remember that he is a god or at least an advanced being visiting these deeply inferior beings called humans. I think that like in a way when Thor first comes to earth Loki also shares an arrogance about being superior to them. The journey for Thor and that character is to learn humility. So by the end of Thor Thor, as played brilliantly by Chris Hemsworth, has respect, affection, and love for the human race. I’m not sure that Loki has developed that yet.