Loki star Owen Wilson got an MCU crash course from Tom Hiddleston himself for Disney+ series

If you're a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's a good chance you've spent a long time watching the various films and series contained within its vast shared narrative, earning your encyclopedic knowledge by absorbing the entire saga more than once, and maybe even more than 10 times.

But what if you weren't an MCU fan, or at least not a big one, and you had to learn all about the continuity as quickly as possible? How would you like to receive that information? 

A lecture from Tom Hiddleston himself is probably high on a lot of people's lists — and that's exactly what Owen Wilson got when he signed on to co-star with Hiddleston in the upcoming Disney+ series Loki. 

Wilson joins the MCU via Loki as Mobius, a member of the Time Variance Authority who's tasked with interviewing and monitoring the title character (Hiddleston, returning for his first starring role in the Marvel universe) after he creates an alternate timeline through use of the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame. This version of Hiddleston's Loki is an alternate version of the same Loki who was captured at the end of The Avengers, so he hasn't yet been through the events of later films that would ultimately make him more heroic.

Put simply, he's a handful (but one with that potential to be better still inside him!), and Mobius is one of the characters who has to figure out how to handle him and draw that potential out. 

In an interview on The Jess Cagle Show this week, Cagle asked Wilson how he prepared for the role, and if he did any digging into the comic book basis for his character. Wilson responded by essentially framing his co-star as his teacher, who gave him a crash course in all things MCU. 

"No, I didn't," Wilson said when asked if he did comics research into the role. "Maybe I should have, but actually Tom Hiddleston kind of, who of course plays Loki...he kind of, or we kind of, you know, they were almost like the Loki lectures. And so he, for a couple days walked me through everything and the whole lore and showing me clips from the other movies and how it all fed into this story. So it was really kind of Tom telling me about it, telling me about his character. And even in the way sometimes that he would describe his character, it was useful for me because my character Mobius in Loki is kind of interviewing him at some point. So it kind of worked doing it that way."

Though Loki marks the first time Hiddleston has landed the title role in an MCU project, he remains one of the franchise's longest-serving and most-beloved stars. This year marks a full decade since he debuted as Asgard's resident trickster in the first Thor film, and he's since ridden a wave of fan love that's taken him through three Thor films, three Avengers films, and now a Disney+ series that will let him lean back on some of Loki's more villainous tendencies.

As Wilson pointed out, it's actually rather fitting that Hiddleston is the one who educates him on what comes next, because there's probably no one who understand the MCU version of Loki better than he does. 

Plus, "The Loki Lectures" should absolutely be its own Disney+ series in which Hiddleston walks viewers through various topics, in character. You'd know you'd watch it. 

Loki premieres on Disney+ this May.