Marvel Studios’ Loki series for Disney+ has added Gugu Mbatha-Raw as one of Tom Hiddleston’s co-stars. Even though Loki died at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, his future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was given new life in Avengers: Endgame. As part of the Avengers’ time travel missions, the 2012 version of Loki escaped the Avengers’ grasp using the Tesseract and will now be the lead of a Disney+ show chronicling his next adventure.

With production just recently beginning, Marvel Studios surprised fans with a first look at Loki recently in their MCU Disney+ Super Bowl commercial. The footage teased Loki’s time-traveling story as the trickster was in custody by the Time Variance Authority - a group that monitors the timeline with a specific interest in time travel. Details on what the show will contain beyond the TVA and Loki crossing paths has yet to be revealed, but now we know one more cast member who will factor into the story.

According to Deadline, Gugu Mbatha-Raw has joined the cast of Loki. Her character was not revealed, but she is believed to play a prominent role in the series, possibly even the female lead. Mbatha-Raw is a familiar actress for Disney, having appeared in the live-action Beauty and the Beast and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, but now she’ll join one of their upcoming MCU projects. She also recently starred in an indie superhero movie Fast Color.

Mbatha-Raw has been an actress near the top of various MCU fan casts for years, with her previously being a popular suggestion to play the adult Monica Rambeau. In a 2018 interview with Screen Rant, Mbatha-Raw said that she would be interested in joining the MCU if the right role came along. Now that she is part of the Marvel family, there is no telling what type of character she’ll play in Loki, or even if she’ll have any powers. If she does, she previously told us that “a nuanced complex superhero” is the type of hero she’d like to play, so it is possible Loki has given her that chance.

Even with Mbatha-Raw joining Loki, the cast for the upcoming Disney+ show remains fairly small. She joins Sophia Di Martino and Owen Wilson as unknown characters in the series opposite Hiddleston’s Loki. We also know that Marvel is looking to cast the MCU’s first transgender character Sera, so that role (and others) will hopefully be announced in the days or weeks to come. But now that Mbatha-Raw’s inclusion in Loki is known, there’s always the potential that details on her role will be revealed soon as well.

MORE: What To Expect From The Loki TV Show

Source: Deadline

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