Tom Hiddleston

Tom Hiddleston portrayed Loki Laufeyson in Thor and The Avengers and will reprise the role in Thor: The Dark World.

Significant roles

 * Randolph Churchill in The Gathering Storm (2002)
 * Bill Hazledine in Suburban Shootout (2006-2007)
 * John Plumptre in Miss Austen Regrets (2008)
 * Magnus Martinsson in Wallander (2008-2010)
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight In Paris (2011)
 * Captain Nicholls in War Horse (2011)
 * Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea (2012)

Quotes

 * "Loki's like a comic book version of Edmund in King Lear, but nastier."
 * "Ken (Branagh) wants Loki to have a lean and hungry look, like Cassius in Julius Caesar. Physically, he can't be posing as Thor."
 * "I hope that he is a villain that you love to hate, rather than a villain that you just hate. Well, I think throughout the course of the film I think you can understand his motivation. Loki isn't just an anarchist. He's not just someone who's out to burn the house down. I think his villainy, or what gives him credentials as a supervillain, is that he comes from a deep sense of betrayal. He's caught between two worlds and he's highly alone. And someone with an inclination towards mischief anyway, someone who likes pulling practical jokes, he's a prankster. That inclination is fed into the rejection and he becomes kind of a destructive force. So it's pretty fun." 
 * "I like that Loki is such a good liar that you can't tell. I didn't want to do any winking at the audience to say like, this is when I'm lying. Um, I think in the film, I don't want to give too much away, but you find out that Loki has been responsible for a hell of a lot more than you first might have imagined. And that's all over the comics. You'll be following Thor through one adventure and you think there's one particular bad guy and then Stan Lee and Jack Kirby will pull Loki out from behind the curtain and you see him pulling the strings and you go, "Oh my God, it was Loki all along." Yeah, he is a shape-shifter, someone that is not to be trusted."
 * "I did a lot of training, actually. Ken asked for me to be very lean and very strong at the same time. And he wanted me to develop a fighting style that would be much closer to, I don't know if you've heard about the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira. If Thor was a big rock then Loki was like the wind. And he would just dance around this sturdy block of granite that was Thor. And so I developed a kind of fighting style that was much more balletic. I used to jump rope a lot. Ken said I don't want you to build muscle, because I could have. But he wanted to keep me really lean and really flexible so that he would swing the hammer and I would bend around it."
 * "I'm not sure I'm allowed to say at this point."
 * "I think it's astonishing. I think that Marvel is an imaginative organization. It's truly epic and ambitious. It's like bringing together a fleet of ocean liners and having them all sail together. I really think it's truly amazing. I was doing another television job in Sweden about three years ago. I had a day off and I went into a local town and I went to see Iron Man and I became an immediate fan. And in that moment never imagined that two years later I would be the next one along that was leaning towards the union of these heroes. I think it's epic."
 * "The Asgard sets were like walking through a futuristic palace. They'd matched the size of the spaces to the size of the studio, so it felt like you were walking through the gorgeous palaces of a shining city in the sky."
 * "I actually loved Jotunheim," "It was the first set we were on. Jotunheim is where the Frost Giants live, who are the mortal enemies of Asgardians."
 * "It's basically a planet that is made of ice. If you can picture any alpine region like the French Alps or the Rockies or something — it's kind of like that on acid, it's just bigger and spikier and I loved all that. They had really realistic ice flows and snow and mountains and dripping water."
 * "I had been in LA to help put the finishing touches to Marvel Studios’ next comic book super-hero adventure movie, Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins. I’m proud to say that I am continuing a long tradition of British baddies and play the film’s villain, Loki, Thor’s younger brother and the Norse god of mischief."
 * "It is a Marvel comic/epic Norse odyssey all of its own in which Thor, the god of thunder, is cast out of Asgard and has to find a way home. As the damaged and jealous Loki, I do my best to stop him. The film is an explosion of brilliant, bright-coloured thunder and lightning, with stormy family dynamics at its centre, and, I hope, will be huge fun."
 * "Well, I don’t know. When I signed my contract, I signed to play Loki in five more Marvel movies, but they were unspecified. So, if there will be more movies or not remains to be seen, but I like the idea of Loki turning up in the shadows when people least expect him, but you never know these things, the world changes and the things change, but I feel like I know who Loki is, so I wouldn’t mind."
 * See this is where there could be some kind of assassin sitting and waiting to shoot me. Well you are on to something. You have seen that tag and you are on to something. So Loki can mind control people but there are certain things that Loki has to do himself. So I wouldn’t say that it is all going to be Stellan.
 * Tom as Loki is in The Avengers, I can guarantee that.
 * "Well this is the first time I’ve had to talk about it because for so long I was asked to not say anything. You are the first to ask me, you won’t be the only one, but you are the first. Loki has big, big plans and it’s going to take more that just Thor to stop him this time."
 * The action of Thor is as much an origin story for Loki as it is for Thor. I think the Loki we see in The Avengers is further advanced. You have to ask yourself the question: [THOR SPOILER ALERT]how pleasant an experience is it disappearing into a wormhole that has been created by some kind of super nuclear explosion of his own making? So I think by the time Loki shows up in The Avengers he’s seen a few things.
 * There absolutely are references to what happened to him. There are references to where he’s been, and what he’s been doing.
 * Dude it’s absolutely amazing let me just tell you. I read the script again the other day and Joss Whedon has written the most extraordinary template of a film for this to happen. I feel like he has balanced it so well. All the different elements you want from all the different colors and flavors of each character are in there. Arguably seven not just four characters are in this and I think Joss has made a virtue of that potential unbalance. These are seven big egos, and I’m referring to the characters not the actors. They all want to be the alpha male, or in Black Widow’s case the alpha female. So he has made a virtue of that by having them all compete for the top dog slot. And while they are all fighting each other Loki can get to his business. Look it’s Hulk, Cap, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Nick Fury. What more can you ask for?
 * I start in about ten days. It’s already started filming. It started last Monday, April the 25th. Chris (Hemsworth) and I, as soon as Thor is up and running and out in the world, we’ll be out to New Mexico with the rest of them. I’m so excited man. I feel like I’ve built the character now, I’ve built the house and in a way doing a second film is like getting to take credit for it.
 * I knew it would be more than just Thor but I didn’t know for sure. If I had sucked in Thor then Kevin Feige would have said, “Tom thank you very much and we never want to see you again.” So in a way it’s a huge compliment and I’m very pleased to at least be asked back to the playground.
 * [laughs] I quite simply don’t tell anyone. It’s very hard, because it’s just so exciting, and especially when you’re right in the middle of it. Exactly a year ago we’d finished – the main shoot for Thor was January to May 2010 – and I went back to London and I hadn’t seen my friends for six months. And they were like, “So how was it?” And I would say, “I can’t tell you other than the fact that it was awesome!”
 * Yeah, yeah. I’ve started my own preparation. I’ve read the shooting script and it’s absolutely wonderful. So much fun, and there’s a lot of juice to Loki as well – flavors we haven’t seen of him as well.
 * You never know, I guess. I think mischief, in a way, I think a reason for it… I’m positive the reason for it, was that he has less responsibility. He’s the second son and like a lot of second, third, fourth children, they have a greater freedom. The first born has to carry the responsibility of inheriting the father and mum’s value system, and that’s Thor. Thor inherits Odin’s value system, and Loki is just a bit freer. He also - I haven’t got biceps the size of Chris Hemsworth’s biceps. There’s something about siblings as well, like, whatever your brother can do, your sibling can do, you want to define yourself in opposition to them. That’s what sibling rivalry is about. You’re really good at tennis, I am going to go and be really good at painting; and you can’t draw, and I can draw. So I think that’s how you get differences in values."
 * "I think his motivations change. I think he cares less about… how do I say this without being assassinated? [laughs] I think he’s not so concerned with beating his brother anymore. I think he has bigger plans than just being bigger than his brother, I would say. And because his plans get bigger, the necessaries needed to defeat him, I think, need to be bigger."
 * "I've seen everybody in costume. What was it like? It's great! It's everything everyone has been imagining except it's better. It's funny how everybody looks so entirely iconic in their own individual way, and then together there's a whole different level of iconography."
 * "It really is happening...It's very exciting."
 * "If only there were. I have not been excluded from the group party. I'm in the fold. I'm in the fold of the family."
 * "At the beginning of The Avengers, he comes to earth to subjugate it and his idea is to rule the human race as their king. And like all the delusional autocrats of human history, he thinks this is a great idea because if everyone is busy worshipping him, there will be no wars so he will create some kind of world peace by ruling them as a tyrant. But he is also kind of deluded in the fact that he thinks unlimited power will give him self respect so I haven't let go of the fact that he is still motivated by this terrible jealousy and kind of spiritual desolation."
 * "My favorite moment on set was filming at a NASA location the size of a cathedral. I flew around like a trapeze artist in a rocket-testing facility in the company of Samuel L. Jackson and Jeremy Renner. That was a pretty good day at work."
 * "For the first 10 minutes after you meet them, they have the wattage and charisma of movie stars. Then you have a coffee with them and you realize we're all the same, we're all just people. All of the actors in The Avengers are so nice. Marvel has these code names for projects and the code name for The Avengers was Group Hug. It felt very much like a group hug on set."
 * "The whole Loki thing is just so exciting. "It is quite surreal, because I never expected it to be so fervent, for the passion to be so intense and one always hopes one's work is going to be appreciated, but my God it's a compliment that people have responded to what I did and everybody who’s written letters say such lovely things like 'I really understood what Loki was going through and I understood his emotional predicament' so it’s pretty great."
 * "It's nice to come back, like an old friend. When I came back to do Avengers, I'd gone off and done F. Scott Fitzgerald and Captain Nicholls and Freddie Page in the Deep Blue Sea and when I came back to Loki I was like, 'Hey, man, how’s it going?' "
 * "I had dinner with some of the executives at Marvel and Chris Hemsworth and Patty in London and she's amazing, really. She's the most incredibly fearless director and has a really inate understanding of the muscularity of a character like Thor. I'm not just saying he's jacked-up. I mean, the character itself has an enormously muscular, visceral, emotional complexity and Patty understands it, and she understands it in her bones."
 * "Let's hope Patti thinks he's worth it [an acting role in Thor 2] 'cause I think he is."
 * "There was one day when, as Loki, I was sat on some steps, staring at the Avengers in front of me. It would be quite odd just to look at a grouping that involves [such actors as] Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner and Chris Hemsworth. But the fact that they were dressed in the most outlandish hero costumes was bizarre! And I thought to myself, 'This is the dizzy heights.' "
 * "I have no idea. And without revealing too much, there's a specific skill set you need to be Loki's army - let me know if you have the qualifications. And all I know about Thor 2 is that we're supposed to film it in London in the summer and that it's being directed by Alan Taylor."
 * "I had a lot of fun with him, it was great. Joss has an extraordinary taste, I think. He's got such a brilliant and irreverent sense of humour but also an incredibly deep knowledge of the comic book genre and a respect for the traditions of how these things are handled."
 * "There is a Thor 2. It's been green-lit, and I think it will start shooting in London in the spring. Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman are coming back. I haven't seen the script. This is where I feel the Marvel snipers are waiting and watching across the street..."
 * "I had huge fun with Chris Evans, as Captain America, because super-soldier though he may be, he's still a man, up against a God who in his own mind is infinitely superior. Then, in the ring with The Hulk, we've got this silver tongued, lightening quick mind up against the embodiment of rage..Loki has this mercurial, transformative ability, not just physically but intellectually, so not all the fights are purely physical. Mind games? Maybe.."
 * "There is a personal engine but it's behind a degree of megalomania. When you see Loki let go of that spear at the end of Thor, he lets go of Asgard, he lets go of Asgard and his need for that place and his attachment and need for the affection and respect of Odin and his brother. As he disappears in that wormhole, that's a literal way of saying, "I'm done. Asgard is gone and I have other things to do." At the beginning of The Avengers, you see the beginnings of what Loki is planning and if he doesn't belong in Asgard, where might he belong? In that tragic place of confusion of "Where do I belong in this universe?" Loki's answer is "I will make myself belong", which dark and menacing and dangerous."
 * "I think Loki is very flexible and adaptable to the present context. With each Avenger, he faces a different threat, a different strategy and methodology. Some pose more of a threat than others in his mind, but they all have their own unique superpowers. I say it's like tennis. You'll never play the same game of tennis with a new and different opponent. The magic happens in the space between you, not just with the characters but the actors too."
 * "I am very proud of the film, but I can’t take credit for the trailer myself. This is the work of the brilliant Joss Whedon."
 * "Loki’s villainy is motivated by the fact that he’s damaged and searching for his place in the universe, but in this film he’s a lot more menacing and a lot more powerful. He’s much more self-possessed. He’s also a god, so he’s more powerful than any human."
 * "I have bruises all over my body, but it’s called The Avengers and if it wasn’t action- packed, we’ve failed to do our jobs. We have the greatest stunt team in the world led by R.A. Rondell and Jon Eusebio, so the first thing I did when I got to Albuquerque was hit the stunt gym. I started going through the movements and as I did more and more, I started reconnecting to the character because I believe how you move informs everyone of who you are."
 * "I love shooting action because my brain switches off and it’s almost like a dance once you get the moves down. All you have to do then is add in the emotion of throwing or catching a punch and it almost becomes a very Zen-like experience. So by the time you get to the day of shooting a fight between Loki and Captain America, hopefully the preparation and training kick in and it becomes about the simplicity of execution."
 * "The stunt training was my way of evolving Loki from who he was in Thor and creating a new sense of danger in that he is physically stronger and more dangerous. I did all kinds of martial arts training: Wushu, boxing, lots of stick and staff work, knife work and hand-to-hand combat. There were also a lot of daily repetition drills that condition your body and muscle memory. That’s how you learn to jump off a building, fly through the air, barely miss Chris Hemsworth’s head and get slammed to the ground on your back, pick yourself up and repeat the same motion 12 times over the course of a day in a costume of leather and metal that weighs forty pounds."
 * "We were trying to design the fight so it had big brother-versus-little brother mentality. Thor wants to take Loki home without harming him, while Loki wants to approach the fight with deadly intentions. As the fight continues, emotions escalate and the stakes get bigger. Thor becomes really angry and the fight becomes very brutal at its conclusion. Each of us has a particular weapon and skill and in this fight it’s Loki’s scepter up against Thor’s hammer. Thor uses his hammer like a boxing glove and Loki uses his scepter in more of a Wushu way. But after a little bit, Thor drops his hammer, Loki drops his scepter, and it’s just two brothers fighting sloppy and nasty."
 * "As a cinephile and movie lover, I get such a kick when you see an actor flying across the screen and you know that it’s the real actor who’s done the stunt. I hate when they just cut around a stunt double and you just see the back of the actor’s head. I don’t want to see the back of my head, so I am always ready to get in there and mix it up with the stunt team."
 * "What was the most outrageous rumor? That Coulson was actually a Romulan princess. I thought that was hilarious. What else was there? I just remember trying to keep it secret because I knew all the secrets, the identity of Loki's army for example, which everybody wanted to know."
 * "Loki is such a great, larger-than-life character. He has so many dimensions. He is motivated by jealousy, ambition, pride, vanity, arrogance and greed – and yet he gets to have a lot of fun because of his predisposition towards mischief. On one level, he is this grandiose agent of chaos. He’s a cackling villain standing on rooftops, laughing at the sky. But on another level, he’s a lost child and a brother who was always the second string because he grew up in the shadow of Thor. He’s a rejected, abandoned son who has no place in the universe, so all his destructive anger is motivated by a lack of self-esteem. I don’t think he even knows it, but he’s desperately trying to give himself a purpose."
 * "Kevin Feige suggested Loki would be part of The Avengers storyline when I got cast in Thor, but I was so busy trying to build the character that I couldn’t think about it. I knew perfectly well that if I was rubbish in Thor, I wouldn’t get anywhere near The Avengers. That’s when I thought I’d just take everything one step at a time. Towards the end of the Thor shoot, Joss Whedon came into Marvel for a script meeting and he asked Kenneth Branagh to see a rough cut of Thor. Joss wanted to see what he could do with Chris Hemsworth and where to take the character of Thor, as well as Loki. Joss loved it so much that we went for a cup of tea and we had a long, fantastic conversation where we swapped loads of ideas. Joss said to me, "There’s been some talk of multiple villains in this movie, but I think you can do it on your own," which was the most incredible compliment. I had a mountain to climb after that."
 * "What impressed me the most about Joss initially was the incredible screenplay we had to work with on Marvel’s The Avengers. Directing this film was a feat in itself, but his screenplay was phenomenal. I’m sure none of us really knew what to expect, but I take my hat off to Joss for that. He was incredibly open and that’s what you want as an actor: you want to collaborate. Everyone has a certain level of ownership of their character and Joss was very respectful of that possession. If I’m completely honest, I felt very much like the junior boy on The Avengers. I was in the company of a group of actors that I grew up watching and respecting. Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Downey, Jr. are cinematic legends. I remember watching Robert in Chaplin while I was training at RADA thinking it was one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting I’d ever seen. In addition to that, Scarlett Johansson had already done Lost In Translation when I was at university, so I just felt incredibly lucky and privileged to be working with these actors and to be in these scenes with them. It was amazing."
 * "It was a huge undertaking because it was an amazing challenge and an amazing privilege to play the bad guy. It was a challenge to dial up the menace and I was exhausted when I finished filming. It’s funny how negative energy is so exhausting, and it was certainly a challenge to cultivate Loki’s hatefulness every day. I had to get inside his reservoirs of pain and make that feel real. Hating is exhausting; it’s much more exhausting than loving, and that’s what took it out of me – as well as some of the physical challenges that we all undertook."
 * "As a kid, I loved Superman. For me, Christopher Reeve as Superman was the first superhero. I sat smack-bang in the middle of the audience for that movie. I was the right age at the right time, and I spent a lot of my childhood playing Superman games in the playground."
 * "It's mostly self-applied pressure actually. I remember Chris [Hemsworth] and I saying over the summer when Avengers came out, where do we go now? Going into this one we were - very flatteringly - involved in big creative conversations about tone, and story. Thor and Loki are these two characters that people know and love and understand - so we have to take this in the right direction. You want to do something new - you don't want to re-heat the same recipe in the microwave, you want to cook up something different and exciting - but you don't want to lose the things that worked the first time. So we're our own slave drivers, in a way. Complacency is the enemy. But that's exciting and it's going well. I have never seen a group of actors or a crew work harder."
 * "Yeah! [laughs] He's certainly eaten humble pie. The springboard for us in the second Thor film is at the end of Avengers you see Thor and Loki beamed up back to Asgard. The first question that we all asked was "what happens next? What does Odin have to say about the events of Avengers?" What's Jane Foster been up to while she wasn't involved?" It's really exciting, actually. We're literally half way through - we started at the start of August and we should be finished by Christmas. It's going beautifully."
 * "You never count your chickens. When you're inside it, you're just thinking, 'I hope I haven't screwed this up.' You don't want to be the weakest link in the chain."
 * "Ken established the tone, so we’ve taken the baton and kept running. Alan Taylor is fantastic, one of the men responsible for Game of Thrones which is so of that world, a very grounded, gritty, earthy world where warriors and swords and monsters and magic all meet, so his experience of that has given him a fantastic take on the whole world of Thor. I went to a summer screening of a Marvel short film. Ken came and so did Alan, it was very clear how much mutual respect between them and I thought, ‘ok, it’s going to be fine.’ "
 * "I don't know [if I'll be part of The Avengers 2]. And that really is the honest answer. I know I've been known for obfuscation in other quarters, but I have no idea. I haven't spoken to Joss. He's definitely doing it. So I suspect not, only because I think that probably the audiences are tired of Loki being the bad guy. Maybe the Avengers need somebody else to fight. But I'd love to be part of it again."