Ke Huy Quan's incredible comeback continues with 'Loki' Season 2 role, 'Goonies' nods: 'This is a grownup Data'

Executive producer Kevin Wright humbly admits Loki had an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” quandary heading into its second season.

The first season, following the beloved titular trickster and antihero (Tom Hiddleston) to the end of time and back, drew major kudos from Marvel fans and is generally considered one of the studio’s best Disney+ series yet thanks to its consistently sharp and sometimes droll humor (hello, Owen Wilson!), retro production design and multiverse-expanding action.

So how does Season 2, arriving on the streamer this week, differ?

“I think a thing that Tom and I talked about very early on going into a Season 2 was there was an aspect of Season 1 that felt like catching lightning in a bottle, and that if we just went back and tried to play the hits, even if we nailed it, it wouldn't be as fulfilling because you've experienced it, you felt it before,” Wright tells us in a new interview. “And so the things that got us excited were the things that we were just stoked that the audience responded to, which was so much of the philosophy, the ideas of identity, finding your place in the universe or the multiverse now, and carrying them into Season 2. Because it isn’t just like Loki goes, ‘Oh, I know who I am now.’

“Loki is in absolute turmoil. His heart is broken, his friends don't recognize him anymore. The TVA is going through a huge identity crisis. And if you just live in all of those moments, there is so much rich character drama that just feels like it has to be addressed and can be a cascade of further problems that happen. So we take that and then put it in a boiler.”

Indeed, Season 2 finds Loki reeling from his separation from his variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), last seen killing He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). His death — as he prophesied — leads to not only short-term upheaval at the Time Variance Authority (TVA) but all sorts of timeline-threatening danger, including the inevitable emergence of Majors’s Kang the Conqueror and his millions of variants, as teased at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. (Wright told us Majors’s recent arrest on assault, strangulation and harassment charges ultimately had no effect on how much the actor was used in Season 2, and that the show was the rare Marvel property to undergo no reshoots.)

One much-welcomed new wild card in Season 2 is Ke Huy Quan, the former Indiana Jones and Goonies child actor who had the comeback of the century last year when he won every major award for his role in The Daniels’ Oscars-dominating multiverse sensation Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Quan, 52, brings a deliriously chaotic energy to Season 2 from the very first episode as OB, the TVA’s basement-dwelling technician (and author of its sacred guide book).

Everything Everywhere had just opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles when Wright, who was in London prepping, got a call from their casting director, Sara Finn. “She said, ‘Hey, I'm about to start putting together a list for possible OB’s, but before I do that, I think you guys should meet Ke. His movie's about to blow up. … I think it should be him. I think if we don't make an offer before the weekend's over, he might become very, very busy.'”

Wright and his team Zoomed with Quan the next day and pitched him the show. Two days later they called in “the big gun,” Marvel chief Kevin Feige, who offered Quan the role. The actor was on a plane to London soon thereafter, and EEAAO developed into a true-blue cultural phenomenon as cameras began rolling on Loki’s sophomore six-episode season.

Quan fans will no doubt pick up on similarities between the TVA’s new tech guru and his Goonie adventurer, the gadgeteer Data.

“The character was already that [way],” Wright notes. “But when we cast him, when he came on, he called it out. He was like, ‘This is a grownup Data.’ And I would say for eagle-eyed viewers, there are a number of Easter eggs to Ke's filmography, both recent and past, that pepper his workshop.”

Of course, the series is still driven by Hiddleston and the mischievous villain-turned-hero it’s named after. Since debuting as the Norse god in 2021’s The Avengers, the British actor has become one of the franchise’s longest-tenured stars. And Wright says he can go a lot longer.

“I've been working on Loki with Tom for five years now,” Wright says. “He and I shared an office. There was an adjoining door. He would burst in like Kramer [from Seinfeld] as we were developing the show with great ideas.

“Tom puts his heart and soul into that character. But you see it turn on. He’s not Loki. That charisma is always there... But he has talked a lot about this character and how he is a steward to the character of Loki. He is one man getting to play it for right now. And I think he will play it as long as he wants to, and as long as we keep making these things. But there is a real sense of ownership and responsibility to that character. And so it's like it's Tom and then the cameras start rolling and you're like, ‘There he is.’ Like it comes on and it's always exciting to see it happen. And he always finds new shades to it that are so exciting.”

Loki Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.