Tom Hiddleston has had to play it very close to the vest when asked about potentially reprising the role of Loki up until now, but following the recent Avengers: Doomsday cast announcement, he can finally discuss his imminent return as the God of Mischief.
"Very excited," Hiddleston told TikTok star Max Balegde when asked how he's feeling about his Doomsday involvement. "It’s been an extraordinary chapter in my life playing Loki, and it's not over yet."
"It's really remarkable, actually, that I can talk about it because mostly I'm in a position of knowing and not being able to say anything," he added. "It’s strange, you know you have to be disciplined about carrying this secret around."
Though we pretty much figured Hiddleston would be back at some point, his Doomsday casting was at least somewhat surprising given the events of the recent second season of Loki.
The season finale appeared to give the former villain a pretty definitive ending by allowing him to fulfil his "Glorious Purpose" and claim a throne - even if it wasn't the one he had originally envisioned - but the door was left open (or at least ajar) for him to return down the line.
After deciding to, for all intents and purposes, sacrifice himself by destroying the Temporal Loom and use his magic to gather all the loose timelines together, Loki essentially transformed into a version of Yggdrasil, the World Tree from Norse mythology.
It's implied that "God Loki" must sit here for eternity to ensure that his friends and everyone else can live in peace on the various timelines, so it'll be interesting to see how the character is brought back into the fray.
Hiddleston gave his take on Loki's "moving" final moments in the Disney+ series during a 2024 interview.
“I hope it feels redemptive because his broken soul is partially healed; and you see that this character, who is capable of love, has made a decision from and for love,” he says. “At the end of Season 2, Loki is sitting on a kind of throne; but it’s not arrived in the shape he expected, and there’s no glory in it. There’s a kind of burden, and he’s alone. He’s doing it for his friends, but he has to stay there without them. There’s a poetic melancholy there which I found very moving.”
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on May 1, 2026, followed by Avengers: Secret Wars on May 7, 2027. Both films will be directed by the Russo brothers, who also make their MCU return after helming Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.
"Being able to create stories and explore characters within the Marvel Universe fulfilled a life-long dream of ours, and we discovered a powerful connection with audiences in each film that we made. We’re thrilled to collaborate once again with Kevin, Lou and the entire Marvel team to bring this epic adventure in storytelling to new and surprising places for both the fans and ourselves”, said The Russos in a statement after the SDCC panel.
You can check out the full (for now) Doomsday cast list below.
• Paul Rudd as Ant-Man
• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi
• Tom Hiddleston as Loki
• Lewis Pullman as Sentry
• Florence Pugh as Yelena
• Danny Ramirez as Falcon
• Ian McKellen as Magneto
• Sebastian Stan as Bucky
• Winston Duke as M’Baku
• Chris Hemsworth as Thor
• Kelsey Grammer as Beast
• James Marsden as Cyclops
• Channing Tatum as Gambit
• Wyatt Russell as U.S. Agent
• Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm
• Rebecca Romijn as Mystique
• Patrick Stewart as Professor X
• Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler
• Letitia Wright as Black Panther
• Tenoch Huerta Mejia as Namor
• Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards
• Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost
• Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm
• David Harbour as Red Guardian
• Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom
• Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing
• Anthony Mackie as Captain America