A ruler. A conqueror. A jerk. He Who Remains. Or a tired, megalomaniacal Black business owner. No matter what you call him, Kang the Conqueror is here.
The season finale of Loki introduced us to one of the most electric, charismatic, and terrifying villains yet, played by Jonathan Majors. Fans didn’t know what to expect, especially since the previous Marvel Disney+ series left theorizers shell-shocked with half-baked reveals (or no reveals at all). But, as Loki has done all season, it confidently swung for the fences and hit it out of the park.
“‘Be brave, walk through the door, and leave it on the field.’ That was my mentality,” Majors said about how he approached playing Kang to EW.com.
“…There’s more smiling in that one performance than there has been in my other performances combined,” he continued. “It’s just what it calls for. I’m a classically trained clown. That’s part of my training. I’ve been at it for a long time, and to be able to exercise that was a lot of fun.”
Majors’ explosive performance–including his improvised jump on the table in front of Sylvie (Sophia di Martino) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston)–gets better. He also voiced the Time-Keepers, with director Kate Herron telling EW that Majors sent her and the Loki team “all of these different voices he could do for each character, which was great.”
Hiddleston was among those in the cast and crew astounded by Majors’ performance.
“I want to salute Jonathan Majors. He came in the last lap of this series and made an extraordinary impact,” he said to Marvel.com. “[I]t’s quite something to do that for a story, to get to its final chapter adn to introduce the character of such breadth, and depth, and charisma, and intelligence. He was dazzling. It was our final week of filming, literally. He came in and blew us all away.”
Seeing Majors as the most potent force in the multiverse is one thing. But the fact that his voice became so anonymous as the Time-Keepers shows we have only seen him tap the surface of his talent. We should prepare ourselves for seeing Majors range the gamut of personalities as he traverses the lives of various Kang variants throughout multiple films and TV shows. We are in for the ride of our lives watching Majors singlehandedly take over the MCU.
