What clip was this? Where were they?

It’s actually kind of reassuring to hear that you thought Tom was the one being more aloof toward Chris; I sort of thought Chris was turning the cold shoulder toward Tom. I don’t really know why, but I kind of wonder if it had anything to do with Tom not being completely on board with the “reinvention” of Thor and Loki’s characters in Thor: Ragnarok. Pretty obviously Chris Hemsworth was the driving force; he recommended bringing on Taika Waititi, he wanted to do more “comedy,” he was tired of speaking in archaic language and basically just wanted to get paid to be himself on film. In interviews, Taika kept talking about how he wanted to make Thor the most interesting character in his own film; the unspoken implication was that Loki had always been the most interesting character (which many of us know is true). So in order to steal Thor’s thunder back, Taika and (to some unknown extent, given how much was improvised) the screenwriter, Eric Pearson, reduced Loki to an effete, narcissistic, incompetent caricature of himself, mocked and minimized the traumas he had experienced, and eliminated all of the psychological and motivational complexity he had shown in previous movies, leaving him with only two features/motivations: (1) he’s essentially “the god of mischief,” and therefore he likes to betray people just for shits and giggles; and (2) he really wants Thor to love him.

Tom Hiddleston is a very smart man and a consummate actor. He really sank his teeth into the role of Shakespearean tragic hero that Kenneth Branagh and the screenwriters of Thor 1 (Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz) gave him. He had one hell of a good time as the twisty, theatrical, not-so-secretly tortured villain Joss Whedon wrote for The Avengers. He threw himself into the pathos and the desperate mania of the conflicted antihero in Thor: The Dark World (some credit to Markus & McFeely, even though I think they’re dimwitted hacks; some credit to Joss Whedon, whose main prescription as script doctor was “more Loki”). I don’t know if you’ve seen him in The Hollow Crown or Coriolanus, but it’s hard to tell he’s even speaking Elizabethan English because the words flow off his tongue as if he was born speaking them, and he makes the meaning and the feeling in the language so lucid that I feel like I was born hearing it. He disappears into his roles; there’s almost nothing of Tom in Loki, or in Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager, or in Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea.

And then they gave him this pathetic caricature in Ragnarok and wanted him to play second fiddle to a version of Thor who wasn’t even really a character anymore, just Chris Hemsworth dressed in space armor. They stripped away all the depth and complexity that Tom had been bringing to Loki over the years; they gave him almost no psychology to work with. For an actor who pours his heart and soul into his roles, who was trained in Shakespeare and swims around in it like a fish, can it have been anything other than disappointing and humiliating? But Tom is so good-natured and obliging, it seemed like he couldn’t blame Taika or Chris – his “brother” of 8 years, who had betrayed him for the sake of his own vanity; he just seemed dejected and unenthusiastic about the whole thing. It seemed to me like Chris was shunning Tom, and the only explanation I could offer (aside from other interpersonal things I couldn’t possibly speculate on, or like… judging him for the Taylor Swift business) was that Chris was mad that Tom wasn’t wholly on board with the thoughtless, petulant destruction of the character he had been building for years, the character dynamic he’d thought they had been building together. If Tom is being aloof toward Chris, good for him. Chris fucking deserves it.