Jonathan Majors made his much-anticipated return to the MCU in the third episode of the second season of Loki. He played a variant of He Who Remains (Kang) named Victor Timely. The episode proved to be a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase between who gets hold of Timely first between Ravonna Renslayer and the duo of Loki and Mobius. Majors himself gave a magnetic performance as the character.
His performance was a stark difference from how he portrayed He Who Remains in the first season. While He Who Remains was particularly overtly goofy yet manipulative, Timely was more subdued and vulnerable. The director of the third episode has now revealed the inspirations behind the creation of Victor Timely.
Jonathan Majors’ Victor Timely is Inspired by a Real-Life Black Inventor
Jonathan Majors returned as a variant of Kang the Conqueror named Victor Timely. He is shown as an inventor who is trying to build a prototype of a temporal loom. The duo of Loki and Mobius want to get hold of him in order to stop the TVA’s destruction, while Ravonna Renslayer and Sylvie both want their hands on Timely for their own specific reasons.
The director of the third episode Kasra Farahani talked about the creation of a wholly unique Kang variant and the inspirations behind it. He told The Hollywood Reporter,
“There was a lot of discussion in the writers’ room about figuring out who Victor Timely is and how he was going to be used to service the storyline of the season. We kind of wanted to keep that shrouded in mystery because there was going to be an expectation about what Kang is going to be like. So we wanted to delay the moment of revealing his nature until then.
Jonathan showed up with so much work and invention in terms of the Timely character, and some of the conversations that he and I had in the run-up to shooting were about a historical figure named Granville Woods. He was a Black inventor from the late 19th century, and he lived exactly when Timely would’ve lived, basically.
He invented so many things, and people were constantly trying to steal them from him. Edison twice tried to take his patents, but [Edison] lost in court and ended up offering Woods a job, which was declined. So he was an important figure that went into Timely as well, but Jonathan built the mannerisms, the physicality, the quirkiness and the specific mix of how he represented intellectual brilliance with social awkwardness, a degree of charlatanism and pathos at the end.”
Majors gave a magnetic performance that also was a departure from the previous performances he gave as He Who Remains or Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It remains to be seen how Victor Timely contributes to the further proceedings of Loki season 2 and what his overall arc is in the series.
Humanizing Miss Minutes in Loki Season 2 Was a Necessary Step for the Character
Miss Minutes had a bold and interesting arc in the third episode of the second season of Loki. She is seen to be longing and desiring for Victor Timely’s attention and love. This aspect of humanizing the character was decided on pretty early in the scripting stages. Director Kasra Farahani talked about this evolution of the character with The Hollywood Reporter saying,
“Fleshing Miss Minutes out in terms of humanizing her and seeing more of her human desires and aspirations was an idea that Eric Martin put on the wall pretty early. It was one of those ideas that made it all the way through, which doesn’t happen a lot of the time.
So, to my knowledge, doing something rich with this character was pretty well embraced right away, and it’s all the more interesting because she’s a cartoon. People refer to reductive characters as cartoons in a pejorative way, and we’re trying to give Miss Minutes, a literal cartoon, these super awkward and complex emotional feelings.”
The character is sure to have an integral part in the forthcoming episodes of the season. Fans can’t wait to see what Miss Minutes has up in her sleeves when the latest episodes of Loki are released every Friday on Disney+.
