Loki has already introduced us to a whole host of new Marvel characters – namely, the employees of the Time Variance Authority (otherwise known as the TVA). The TVA is an organization tasked with keeping the universe's timeline in check, and they're not best pleased with Loki after he steals the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame and disrupts the course of his destiny. The show sees the God of Mischief team up with Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) to try and set things straight – or not, because this is Loki, after all.
Another TVA employee who is less enthusiastic about working with Loki is Ravonna Renslayer, a judge who would prefer the trickster to face harsher consequences for his time traveling escapades. 12DOVE and Total Film spoke to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Ravonna, about what we might be able to expect from her character as the season progresses.
GR+: In the show, Ravonna is a judge, but is she a good one? Is she always fair, or can we expect any surprising decisions from her in the future?
Gugu Mbatha-Raw: I mean, I have to defend her, of course, because she's my character, right? I mean, she is dedicated. She is so dedicated to the TVA, she's dedicated to the Time Keepers, that is her world. And I think she's worked her way up to the top, so I think she's done it by playing by the rules, and really committing to the Time Keepers' ideology of the Sacred Timeline. So, so far as she's concerned, she's absolutely fair and thorough, and she does her job efficiently. But I think as the show goes on, we get to see some of the morally ambiguous choices that she has to make. I think that she has a lot of tough decisions to make and a lot of responsibility. So yeah, I'll be interested to see what you think further down the line as to whether she's a good or bad judge, but I think that's also the thing about the show is it's the question of is anybody good? Is anybody completely good? Or completely bad? I think all people are flawed, and somewhere in the middle.
It's interesting, because in the comics, she's got a bit more of an antagonistic role to play in the story. So can we expect the same from her on the show? Or is it more of a morally ambiguous sort of thing as you were saying?
GM-R: Well, I think it depends how you look at it. And I think that that's also the interesting thing about the show, and the fact that audiences have been with Loki for 10 years, he essentially started as a villain, but now everybody loves him. He's sort of a lovable antihero. And I think the decisions that every character makes, they're making the decisions that seem like the best decisions to them in the situation that they're in. I think she definitely is an antagonist, or Loki is an antagonist to her, because she exists for order. And he is the god of chaos, you know, he's the God of Mischief, but he creates a lot of chaos. So I think that they're already sort of diametrically opposed in their philosophies and approaches to life.
Will Ravonna get to leave her desk and get out of the office and into the action at any point? Will we see a clash between her and Loki?
GM-R: It's difficult to answer that. But yes, she does. She does get out of her office in later episodes, so it was really fun to be able to do some of the stunt training and fight training that we see a bit later in the show, so you just have to wait for later episodes to see Renslayer sort of get into the action.
Loki is now streaming on Disney Plus – make sure you never miss an episode with our Loki release schedule.
