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Loki's knives are out: Tom Hiddleston explains the trickster's affinity for daggers

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Published on July 8, 2021 10:06AM EDT

Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) knives are almost always out. Daggers and other small blades have been a consistent part of the God of Mischief's arsenal since his debut 2011's Thor. So much so Disney+'s Loki recently poked fun at the trickster's love for blades in its fifth and penultimate episode, which dropped Wednesday morning.

"Take no offense, my friends, but blades are worthless in the face of a Loki's sorcery," said Richard E. Grant's Classic Loki in the most recent episode, explaining why he didn't try to stab Thanos after Ragnarok like Hiddleston's Loki did before he died in Avengers: Endgame. "They stunt our magical potential."

"But, they look awesome," Boastful Loki (DeObia Oparei) replied.

That they do, especially in Hiddleston's hands. (See Hiddleston's knife flip in the Thor: Ragnarok teaser and the Loki trailer.) So when EW spoke to Hiddleston for our recent digital cover story, we asked him to break down where the mercurial anti-hero's affinity for daggers came from and how he developed that knife trick.

Hiddleston began by explaining that it all started on the first Thor movie when they were shooting the scene in which Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki, Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander), and the Warriors Three fought the Frost Giants. During the battle, Loki slashes one foe in the chest with a knife, and throws a blade at another one after Fandral (Josh Dallas) gets impaled by ice. (It's worth noting this scene also marked the debut of the "turning an invisible door knob" hand flourish Hiddleston does whenever Loki conjures an illusion.)

"The idea of throwing knives came from something that evolved out of a conversation with [director] Kenneth Branagh, which is that Loki's fighting style is quick, efficient, and lethal," Hiddleston told EW. "That Thor was like a block of granite, but Loki was like the wind. You couldn't really pin him down. Thor was solid, stable, immovable, and enormously powerful, and Loki was dancing around him like a sprite or as unpredictable as the wind. And then the knives, I suppose, stuck in the canon."

That eventually led to Hiddleston improvising a knife-flip in Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok while shooting some choreography with costar Idris Elba, who played Heindall.

"So there's a big sequence on the bridge at the end of the film, and we all had these sequences of choreography while Chris and Cate Blanchett were fighting together, and myself and Idris and Taika had all these pieces we had to do with the fantastic stunt department in their motion capture suits," Hiddleston recalls. "And we were doing that run, it was an afternoon, and it was myself and Idris and maybe Taika. I can't remember. Definitely Idris was there, and it was a two-shot of us fighting these fantastic athletes that are the stunt guys. And I ran out of choreography. Basically, I think I finished my moves before Idris, and he was still rolling, and I didn't want to just be standing there like a lemon, not doing anything interesting. So I just flipped the knives, and caught them by chance."

He continued: "And Idris laughed about it. We watched it back. He was [like], 'Oh, god, he's gone and done a knife flip at the end of it.' Because he was finishing his fight moves. But, yeah, it ended up staying. I've since tried to do it. Every time I try to do it with wooden spoons, it never works, and I always drop one. So it was one of those things, but lightning never strikes twice."

If you watched the most recent episode of Loki, then you know Loki upgraded from daggers to a short sword (which is likely Laevateinn, the sword he can summon at will in the pages of Marvel Comics) that Kid Loki (Jack Veal) gave him to fight Alioth.

The sixth and final episode of Loki arrives next Wednesday on Disney+.

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