‘Loki’ Head Writer Says ‘Catch Me If You Can,’ ‘Before Sunrise,’ ‘Blade Runner’ & Mad Men’ Influenced His Marvel Series

If you don’t already, you should know writer Michael Waldron if only because his career has greatly accelerated in the last two years. Originally working with Dan Harmon and as a writer on “Rick and Morty,” he quickly fast-tracked: he became the head writer on Marvel’s “Loki,” then was recruited to do a major rethink/rewrite on “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness,” and also penned an untitled “Star Wars” movie the Marvel boss Kevin Feige. Nice work if you can get it.

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Interestingly, Waldron says the world of “Loki,” that the God of Mischief would be within the walls of the TVA (Time Variance Authority), was already dreamt up by Kevin Feige and some of the series’ producers. What he brought to, he told  Vanity Fair‘s Still Watching podcast, which you can listen to below in full, is the “emotional core,” and or as he put it, he put “the meat on the bones” of the skeletal set-up they offered him. Additionally, Waldron teased several unexpected influences on the show ranging from romantic indies to prestige TV classics.

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“I came up with the emotional engine of the whole thing,” he said. “The fans of Loki watched him experience a character arc through Infinity War, and in a lot of ways, maybe even arc out. How do we break new ground with this character? What better movies and TV shows did I intend to rip off in each episode?” Waldron mentioned “Blade Runner,” “Mad Men,” “Before Sunrise,” “Catch Me If You Can,” but didn’t quite elaborate what that meant other than agreeing with Vanity Fair that all stories are love stories, platonic or otherwise, and like “Catch Me If You Can,” there’s a bit of a quote-unquote “love story” element between Tom Hiddleston‘s Loki and Owen Wilson’s TVA bureaucrat Moebius.

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So what’s “Loki” going to be like? Waldron couldn’t exactly answer this, and interestingly, Vanity Fair didn’t even get a chance to see the show when they talked to him. Still, in recommending some of the Loki comics fans should read, the head writer explained the series’ emotional engine.

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Waldron recommended the Kid Loki comic (Loki dies and comes back as a kid, essentially. “It investigates and excavates his humanity on a more vulnerable way that you only can with a child,” he explained. “A child version of Loki is still so burdened by the sins of his past self, which is very much what our version of Loki is running up against in the TVA: Look, this is who you are, who you’ve always been. [So the idea is], can a tiger change its stripes?”

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That’s a pretty interesting tell about what the series is actually about. Another interesting character element that Waldron reminds the listener of in this podcast? The version of Loki that audiences know basically came close to heroic redemption in “Avengers: Infinity War,” suffered the loss of mother and father, had great defeats, and grew as a person over the course of the MCU. This version of “Loki” is straight out of the first “Avengers” movie and has not gone through that journey of growth, maturity, and evolution. Essentially, the time-traveling element of the series has allowed Marvel to de-evolve Loki as a person and bring him back to a nastier state.

What Waldron said was their “responsibility,” first and foremost, is doing something new with the character audiences haven’t yet seen.”It was our responsibility to do something different,” Waldron said, talking about going against the grain of the redemption arc Loki experienced in the MCU. “To do justice to the character they’ve called in love with since “Thor: The Dark World,” but ultimately it’s a different version of that character that hasn’t undergone that growth, and we had to embrace that. To me, that was an opportunity to do something different. That’s why the show exists.”

Well, there you go, that’s a pretty good tease for what the “Loki” series is, and it debuts June 9th, next week, on Disney+. Listen to the full Vanity Fair conversation below.