Loki executive producer Kevin Wright has explained how Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie ends up working at McDonald’s in Season 2 and why it is a significant choice for her character.
The first trailer for Loki Season 2 confirmed Sylvie would be donning a McDonald’s uniform to take food orders at some point in the timey-wimey tale, though we don’t know precisely how or why that comes about. Wright wants fans to know there is a very good reason behind the character’s decision to visit the restaurant.
“This character had been on a decades-long, maybe centuries-long revenge mission, and the classic trope of those stories is that it’s all-consuming and she’s not thinking about what comes next,” Wright told Fast Company in an interview about Marvel’s collaboration with McDonald’s. “Now she has this moment of opportunity – where is she going to go?” Di Martino responded, “She’d probably be pretty hungry.”
“When we stayed in the view of character, this woman who went on the run as a child, had been running through time, a fugitive of time, living in apocalypses, never being able to relax or slow down, the novelty of walking into a 1980s McDonald’s looked appealing,” Wright continued. “You play a Little League game and go to McDonald’s. You go to a kid’s birthday party at McDonald’s. Someone like Sylvie would never have experienced that and would be really taken by that.”
Loki fans got another taster of Sylvie working for the fast food company in a recent McDonald’s commercial with Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief. However, Wright wants people to know that McDonald’s inclusion in Season 2 was not born out of a brand partnership; it was written into the script before Marvel reached out.
“I was worried that McDonald’s would think we wanted to do something ironic or make fun of them,” Wright recalled of the moment he approached Marvel’s partnerships people with the idea. “But we were selling an earnest story, a love letter to nostalgia through a character’s eyes who will see all of the novelty and joy of it.”
Loki Season 2 will pick up after the first season and bring “new excitement as it thrusts the infamous God of Mischief into a new set of adventures with the TVA”. Those adventures will include a visit to the Golden Arches at some point during the six episodes that will air, starting with the premiere on Disney+ on October 6.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.