Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s approach to the characters she plays is to get outside of herself. So when it came to the role of Judge Ravonna Renslayer in Loki, Disney’s latest Marvel TV series, she stretched the boundaries of her “joyful, free-spirited” personality into something more dark and mysterious. She even tried to find a fragrance to match.
“I have one scent that was more like an essential oil, like a juniper berry scent for her that I used a little bit,” says Mbatha-Raw over the phone from Vancouver, “but I wasn’t able to do what I would normally do, which is take the time, because of the restrictions of the pandemic, to find something completely unusual.”
Although the lockdown made it difficult, the calming effect of the sweet and woodsy smelling juniper berry is a fitting fragrance for Renslayer, who is initially presented as the lead peacekeeper of time across the multiverse.
“I think we’ve been so used to seeing these archetypal villains and the hero somewhat as two dimensional depictions of those kinds of characters,” the 38-year-old said. “I think the complexity of these morally grey characters, that nobody’s ever completely good, nobody is ever completely bad, and obviously people do bad things with the best intentions as well, that was interesting to me.”
The series, which airs on Wednesdays, follows the Norse god of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) after his disappearance following the events of the 2012 Avengers movie, thus disrupting the movie timeline that saw Loki face a moral reckoning and later sacrifice himself in Infinity War. In the TV show, he is arrested by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic, office-style organization that works to regulate and prevent variations in the Sacred Timeline, which is known as the proper order of historical events.
To the casual eye, Renslayer is a firm, authoritative figure with direct access to the Time Keepers, the unseen gods who control the timeline and are later exposed as robots. After she’s convinced by case worker Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) to spare Loki from execution so he can help search through time for one rogue variant, the cracks in her status begin to reveal themselves. I asked Mbatha-Raw whether her character is a variant, the real time keeper or the true villain behind the show. Of course, that’s not a question she can answer fully at this point, but she explained that she sees Renslayer as “a woman of status. She’s worked her way up. She really began as a hunter and has got to this really high ranking position. And how power affects how people move, how they talk, I think that’s kind of an interesting thing to play with as an actor as well.”
Mbatha-Raw, who is from Oxford, first made a splash after starring in the period piece Belle in 2013, followed by notable films like Beyond The Lights, A Wrinkle in Time and Fast Color. She was classmates with Hiddleston back in drama school, and she says “it was comforting to be around a lot of Brits when the craziness of the pandemic was going on” (Herron, Mosaku and Di Martino all have roots in England too.) “I’m just really proud of everyone,” she added. “I remember when we were like, in the canteen or in our drama school theater and then seeing the scale of the Marvel productions and the scale of the production design and seeing your old friend completely ruling.”
Now with her upcoming psychological thriller series, The Girl Before, and Surface, another Apple TV+ series that’s currently in development, Mbatha-Raw is continuing to flex her muscles at different roles. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the conversation Loki fans are having about the show’s adventure. “Part of the joy of these kinds of shows and Loki specifically is that it’s just a huge escape from real life,” she said. “And there’s a few more questions to answer that maybe will make people excited for more in the future.”