Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, streaming, TV | Tagged: disney, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jonathan Majors, Kasra Farhani, Kevin R. Wright, loki, Marvel Studios, sophia di martino, tara strong, tom hiddleston

Loki Director on Jonathan Majors/Victor Timely, Miss Minutes & More

Loki director Kasra Farahani discusses Jonathan Majors, how Victor Timely differs from other Kang variants, Miss Minutes & much more.

Director Kasra Farahani has come a long way up the ranks as a production designer for Marvel Studios for their cinematic universe, working on projects like Thor (2011), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 (2017), and Black Panther (2018). Loki executive producer Kevin R. Wright trusted Farahani to take charge of directing the second season's third episode "1893" which finds Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Mobius (Owen Wilson), Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Miss Minutes (voice of Tara Strong), and the latest Kang variant, Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Loki: Distinguishing Victor Timely from "He Who Remains" & Kang

When it came to differentiating Majors' Victor Timely from his other variants in "He Who Remains" in season one and Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), "There was a lot of discussion in the writers' room about figuring out who Victor Timely is and how he was going to be used to service the storyline of the season. We kind of wanted to keep that shrouded in mystery because there was going to be an expectation about what Kang is going to be like," Farahani said. "So we wanted to delay the moment of revealing his nature until then. Jonathan showed up with so much work and invention in terms of the Timely character, and some of the conversations that he and I had in the run-up to shooting were about a historical figure named Granville Woods. He was a Black inventor from the late 19th century, and he lived exactly when Timely would've lived, basically. He invented so many things, and people were constantly trying to steal them from him. Edison twice tried to take his patents, but [Edison] lost in court and ended up offering Woods a job, which was declined. So he was an important figure that went into Timely as well, but Jonathan built the mannerisms, the physicality, the quirkiness, and the specific mix of how he represented intellectual brilliance with social awkwardness, a degree of charlatanism and pathos at the end."

As far as any apprehension to Miss Minutes' sinister turn in hopes of turning into a real person, "No, honestly. Not that I'm aware of, at least," Farahani said. "Fleshing Miss Minutes out in terms of humanizing her and seeing more of her human desires and aspirations was an idea that Eric Martin put on the wall pretty early. It was one of those ideas that made it all the way through, which doesn't happen a lot of the time. So, to my knowledge, doing something rich with this character was pretty well embraced right away, and it's all the more interesting because she's a cartoon. People refer to reductive characters as cartoons in a pejorative way, and we're trying to give Miss Minutes, a literal cartoon, these super awkward and complex emotional feelings."
For more, including a tease on Balder the Brave, who was rumored to be attached to the role, tandem bike, acclimating to 360 sets, working with Wilson on Bliss, Prestige Easter Eggs, and the surprise at the end of the episode, you can check out the interview here. Loki streams Thursdays on Disney+.

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