Loki series conjures 'San Junipero' star Gugu Mbatha-Raw for possible prominent role - Report

The upcoming Loki streaming series has reportedly conjured up a new cast member, with the addition of actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who’ll join star Tom Hiddleston on the small screen at Disney+.

Deadline reports that Mbatha-Raw, who most recently has starred in The Morning Show at Apple TV+, has been recruited to the Marvel series to play a yet-unnamed role, but they "hear" it's "a prominent character, described as the female lead." Marvel had no comment.

The versatile actor, who starred alongside Mackenzie Davis in Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning “San Junipero” episode from Black Mirror’s third season, also has appeared in Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast, and the small-budget 2018 superhero film Fast Color.

Mbatha-Raw joins a growing cast surrounding Hiddleston’s iconic Asgardian trickster that also reportedly includes frequent Wes Anderson collaborator Owen Wilson, as well as Sophia Di Martino (Into the Badlands) — though neither have been confirmed yet. Michael Waldron (Rick & Morty) is serving as Loki’s showrunner and, according to the report, is writing the series’ pilot episode; while Kate Herron (Daybreak) will direct.

The new series is set to explore the God of Mischief’s alternate reality starting from the branching timeline that spun him back to life, in a manner of speaking, in Avengers: Endgame. Over Hiddleston’s decade-long appearance in the role, the adopted son of Odin has struggled for family favoritism in Thor, failed at trying to take over Earth in The Avengers, helped his brother out of an interplanetary jam in Thor: Ragnarok, and — until his Endgame return, died at Thanos’ hand in Avengers: Infinity War.

There’s still tons we don’t know about where Marvel and Disney will take Loki, now that the Tesseract has freed him to go on open-ended adventures, but the new series is expected to arrive at Disney+ sometime next year, following on the heels of fellow MCU small-screen series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision.