'Loki' production designer made the Void set specifically so Tom Hiddleston could do his warm-up exercise
Jacob Sarkisian, 13th July 2021
"Loki" production designer Kasra Farahani said that the weird and wonderful set of The Void was specifically designed to enable Tom Hiddleston to do his warm-up exercise routine every day, which consists of running around the set.
Speaking to Insider ahead of the Disney+ show's sixth and final episode, Farahani described the versatile set he and his team made for The Void, where they shot for around seven days, as seen in episode five.
"We built a giant chunk of terrain for The Void ... [and] then swapped in different elements," Farahani said, noting that the set was used for multiple locations within the story. "The giant heads were there one day, the bus shelter where he arrives was there one day, the pile of trays was there one day, and the missile was there another day, and the telephone poles."
The designer, who also served as art director on "Thor" and "Captain Marvel," as well as the concept artist on "Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2" and "Black Panther," said that during filming Hiddleston needed to be able to "really run" on set as his character, Loki, had an action sequence.
"Tom is an excellent runner and his warm-up before coming to set every day is to run around the set really fast a bunch of times," Farahani said. "And so we needed to specifically curate a piece of this terrain to facilitate how fast he wanted to run through this [warmup routine] and that scene."
Farahani described The Void set as "a series of Easter eggs," noting that fans had picked up on a lot of them — including the Polybius arcade game, the Thanos-Copter, the Yellowjacket helmet, and the head of the Living Tribunal statue.
The former of these Easter eggs, the Polybius arcade game, lies in residence in the Loki variants hideout — the bowling alley. But it wasn't always going to be a bowling alley, with the script for the show not specifying exactly what or where the hideout should be or look like.
"It was described as a subterranean temple is all it was," Farahani said. "We liked the idea of a bowling alley because it's buried as strata among all the other deleted realities. We could have it be fractured — almost like you took a bowling alley and broke it over your knee a couple of times and therefore have all these lane lines."
"So when you first enter, the lines point down at this throne area and we thought it would be funny to have a throne that was actually a Santa Claus in a shopping mall that they raided from yet another reality and brought here [to the bowling alley]," the designer continued.
"And then there's the weird alien vines growing through this bowling alley from yet another reality that was perhaps deleted and they're invading each other. In many ways, that set is meant to be a microcosm of the void generally, which has all these different aberrant realities deleted and slammed together."
Farahani said that not all Easter eggs have been found just yet. There are some more "cryptic" eggs that are yet to be found, but he refused to let on exactly what they were.
"I'll have to leave it to fans to investigate," he teased.
