Ke Huy Quan interview: ‘Loki’
Shortly after “Everything Everywhere All at Once” hit theaters in March 2022, Ke Huy Quan‘s agent told him that Kevin Feige will be calling him the next day between 5 and 7 p.m. The pair had worked together before on 2000’s “X-Men,” on which Quan served as an assistant action choreographer and Feige was an assistant producer en route to becoming Marvel Studios president and architect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I’ve always loved him. I always enjoyed working with him. Secretly, I guess, I wanted to work with him when he was making all these wonderful Marvel movies,” Quan tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “Never did I think that I would get a chance that I would get to be part of the MCU family.”
Quan, who had quit acting for nearly two decades due to a lack of roles, credits Sarah Halley Finn, the MCU’s go-to casting director, for the reconnection and opportunity as she had also cast him in his eventual Oscar-winning role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The film came out around the same time that Finn was casting ‘Loki’ Season 2, which included a new character named Ouroboros, aka O.B. “She saw our movie and she called Kevin Feige and told him, ‘I have the perfect person to play Ouroboros and she pitched it to Kevin and Kevin loved the idea,” Quan shares. When Feige called, the producer spent 10 minutes telling Quan how much he loved “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” “I was getting really emotional because it meant so much to me, and right after that, he said, ‘Ke, I would love for you to join the MCU.'”
It was a full-circle moment for the former child star of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) and “The Goonies” (1985) — and fittingly so with a character named Ouroboros. The head — and only employee — of the Repairs and Advancement Department in the Time Variance Authority, O.B. wrote the TVA handbook and has spent 400 years by himself in the R&A headquarters in the basement — the last person he saw was Mobius (Owen Wilson), who got lost down there centuries ago. But this is no jaded and bitter man. O.B. loves his job, has no complaints, and is more than happy to help out Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius to fix the former’s time slipping and stop timeline branches from overloading the Temporal Loom.
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Quan fell in love with O.B. immediately when he read the script — “he was quirky, he was funny, he was energetic” — but was struggling with how to play the character. The actor had discussions with showrunner Kevin R. Wright and head writer Eric Martin, but it was another full-circle moment that unlocked O.B. for him when he was doing costume fittings and makeup tests at Pinewood Studios in London.
“I was told that they were building the Ouroboros set … and I was asked if I wanted to go see it and I said, ‘Sure.’ And as I was walking to go see it, I looked up and on the stage that they were building the Ouroboros set, I saw Roger Moore, the name. That stage was called Roger Moore Stage. Immediately, it dawned on me that Ouroboros is a variant of Data from ‘The Goonies,'” Quan recalls. “Immediately, then I go, ‘Wow, now I get it and I can see clearly who this character is.’ I saw ‘The Goonies’ again to remind myself what it was like playing Data, all those wonderful memories that I had and just my thoughts of it when I played him. So I kind of had to travel 30 years back in time and I brought all those wonderful memories that I had on that set into the present and brought all that energy into Ouroboros. It was one of the best gifts that I’ve ever gotten. Another full-circle moment. For many years, we’ve talked about making a ‘Goonies 2’ and I always wanted that to happen because I thought it would revive my acting career, but of course that never came to pass, so getting this opportunity to play Ouroboros was really incredible. I’m really happy and I’m kind of at peace that if ‘Goonies 2’ doesn’t happen, I will always have ‘Loki.'”
Quan, who’s currently shooting his first lead role in the action film “With Love,” had an “incredible time” working on “Loki” and is “so proud” of it, but he was unable to discuss it during the SAG-AFTRA strike last year. The finale was released the day the strike ended in November. “When it came out, I was so excited. I wanted to go around the world and tell everybody. The strike happened and it prevented us from talking about the show [but now] we can talk about it,” he states. The bittersweet finale sees Loki sacrificing himself to hold together the timelines so his friends could live their lives free of the TVA, which Quan calls “one of the most beautiful arcs that I’ve ever seen onscreen.” O.B. now has friends, is spending more time upstairs and has republished the TVA handbook with Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) as the co-author. But what does the future hold for O.B. in the MCU?
“Hopefully we’ll get to see more of him,” Quan says. “I don’t know anything, but that was one of the questions that I asked Kevin Feige. Because I love him so much and I said, ‘Is this a one-time thing?’ And he was really sweet. He said he always approaches these projects with the fans in mind. And if the fans like the character, you know. I’m very grateful that ‘Loki’ Season 2 got the kind of response and reception that it did.”