Marvel Studios’ latest streaming series, Loki, has already established itself as one of the wildest MCU projects to date. The trickster god’s timeline-altering work with the TVA has made for some of Marvel’s most mind-bending storytelling, while Tom Hiddleston’s lead performance has reinvigorated fans’ appreciation for the actor’s range. Similarly, Owen Wilson’s performance opposite Hiddleston as his bureaucratic guardian, Agent Mobius, has renewed public interest in his work.
The range that Hiddleston has shown off in Loki has already been explored in a bunch of great underrated movies, while Wilson’s performance as Mobius evokes the deadpan dryness of his work in Wes Anderson’s movies. During the interminable week-long wait between episodes of Loki, there are a few terrific Hiddleston and Wilson movies to take a look at.
In 2013, Hiddleston teamed up with director Jim Jarmusch – the indie darling who helmed such acclaimed movies as Stranger Than Paradise, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Paterson – for Only Lovers Left Alive, a love story about two vampires whose strained relationship has endured several centuries. A delightfully offbeat take on the vampire genre, Only Lovers Left Alive is anchored by Hiddleston’s incredible on-screen chemistry with co-star Tilda Swinton. Arriving at the height of the Twilight craze, in many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is the anti-Twilight.
In 2015, Hiddleston teamed up with director Guillermo del Toro, whose ability to push social commentary through genre stories is unparalleled and whose Hellboy trilogy still needs a finale, for the gothic horror gem Crimson Peak. Combining a Victorian-era love story with a classic ghost story, del Toro’s movie sees an aspiring author (Mia Wasikowska) moving out to a haunted mansion in the middle of nowhere with her new husband (Hiddleston) and his sister (Jessica Chastain). While Hiddleston is more of a supporting player here and Wasikowska steals the show, his smarmy take on the role of Thomas Sharpe recalls the mustache-twirling version of Loki circa the Battle of New York that anchors the Disney Plus series.
When Owen Wilson was initially cast as Loki’s sidekick in his solo series, some Marvel fans were skeptical. But those fans only knew Wilson from broad comedies like Starsky & Hutch and You, Me, and Dupree. Wilson got his start working with revered auteur Wes Anderson. He has a writing credit on Anderson’s first three movies and has appeared in all but two of his films. His nuanced work in Anderson’s movies always gives viewers a renewed appreciation for the actor.
In Anderson’s directorial debut Bottle Rocket, Wilson plays a wannabe criminal named Dignan who plans a heist, recruits his friends to pull it off, and then finds himself hopelessly unprepared for a life of crime when it all starts going horribly wrong. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wilson plays a western writer named Eli Cash, a friend of the titular family (and extramarital affair for one of them) who finds himself in the throes of a mescalin addiction.
Bill Murray stars in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as the eponymous Jacques Cousteau-esque oceanographer, but Wilson provides strong support as a pilot from Kentucky who might be his estranged son. In The Darjeeling Limited, Wilson plays the oldest of three brothers who invites the other two (Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) on a spiritual journey across India following a near-death experience. All of these roles have shown depth that Wilson’s more mainstream movies like Drillbit Taylor and Hall Pass has failed to dig into.
Loki isn’t the first time that Hiddleston and Wilson have collaborated. They previously co-starred in Woody Allen’s magical realist romcom Midnight in Paris, which established the duo’s screwball chemistry that Loki has been having so much fun with. Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a nostalgic writer who visits Paris with his fiancée and finds that he has the ability to travel back in time to the 1920s if he waits in a specific spot in the city at midnight. Along the way, he meets such cultural icons as Ernest Hemingway, played by Corey Stoll; Salvador Dalí, played by Adrien Brody; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, played by none other than Tom Hiddleston.
The central dynamic in Loki – Hiddleston as a larger-than-life icon and Wilson as an everyman in awe of him – seems like a direct callback to their scenes in Midnight in Paris. The difference is that, in Midnight in Paris, Wilson is the bewildered fish out of water and Hiddleston is the one introducing him to a magical world that seems mundane to him.
It’ll be interesting to see what the remaining episodes of Loki do with Hiddleston and Wilson’s dynamic. Now that the God of Mischief has betrayed Mobius’ trust, their friendship will undoubtedly be on the rocks. In the meantime, check out some of the actors’ overlooked previous work.