‘Loki’ Directors Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead Tackle the ‘Bold Tragedy’ of Season 2

This article contains spoilers about Loki season two. 

Loki directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are often asked how their collaborative process works when tackling directing responsibilities on the same project. After cutting their Marvel teeth on 2022’s Moon Knight, the pair directed four episodes of Loki season two, including the season (series?) finale. Their process, honed through multiple films and television shows including Moon Knight, matured and evolved over the years, becoming what Moorhead calls “more organic as time goes by.”

One of the greatest benefits, says Moorhead, is the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other before entering the highly collaborative filmmaking environment. Sort of an “ideas trial by fire.”

“We act very much as just a single unit. We prep a lot, which is not really a secret. It’s just kind of our method, so that we pretty deeply understand what we’re going to do when we walk onto set so that when things change, which they inevitably do, we already have at least some some guidelines that we can fall back on,” Moorhead explained. “So, in general, when you ask one of us a question on set, you’re gonna get the same answer from both of us. It works really well that way.”

Loki season two continues the breakdown of the TVA (Time Variance Authority) thanks to the death of He Who Remains at the end of season one. Throughout the season, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) gathers his closest alliance to form a team to reconnect the timelines and avoid complete disaster. It’s a complex, action-packed season that received rave reviews when it dropped in the fall of 2023, in part, for its gravitas and big-swing concepts.

Those big swings were one aspect of approaching the season to which Benson and Moorhead paid close attention. They wanted to get the tone, atmosphere, and sense of adventure just right.

“The main thing I remember about early meetings, about the broad strokes of the story of season two, was that the thing that was really appealing about it was the bold tragedy aspect of it. We just wanted to make sure that we actually delivered on those early conversations of how the season would end, which is basically how the season does end,” Benson said. “It was just making sure that we were actually able to pull this thing off that felt especially bold for its sub genre.”

The main image that drew Benson and Moorhead into the project was that of the final scene. At the end of the series, Loki becomes the hero he never really was and pushes through an extremely dangerous situation to effectively link the timelines together himself. When we see him at the end of the season, he’s sitting alone in a chair, essentially replacing He Who Remains as the person in control of the timelines.

It is a moment to which the entire season builds, and the directors wanted to nail it visually and thematically.

“Loki sitting by himself at the end of time was this thematic image that really drew us in because we we love the idea of him getting what he said he always wanted in the worst way possible,” Moorhead remarked. “In this case, it was a very genuine tragic sacrifice where all he wanted was his friends, and now he can’t have them but at least they get to live. It was important to us that it actually felt like a real tragedy in that way.”

Having previously worked on Marvel’s Moon Knight, Benson and Moorhead found that the initial experience allowed them to test their boundaries. The rumor mill would have filmmakers believe that Marvel is very monolithic, overly controlling, with its property. In reality, the directors found the complete opposite to be true. Marvel Studios ended up having a much broader appetite for experimentation than they originally thought.

Not that the directors had carte blanche. Some things wouldn’t fly, but they were never afraid to offer up a creative solution or a way to do things differently with the project.

“One of the things that was very different from what we did in season one was very naturalistic cinematography. That’s something that comes from our independent film work. We like to throw a camera on our shoulders, see what we do, and then punctuate that with a shot that we plan in extreme detail so it still has a presentational aspect to it,” Moorhead said. “So that was a way that we were able to bring our slightly left-of-center independent film sensibilities into Loki.”

Loki streams in its entirely exclusively on Disney+.