‘Loki’ star Ke Huy Quan on the ‘Goonies’ link to his character, how Tom Hiddleston helped with his technobabble

While The Marvels may have flamed out at the box office, praise has been nearly universal for the second season of Marvel Studios’ Loki, which just wrapped up on Disney+.

Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan joined the cast this season as Ouroboros, or O.B., the quirky tech genius behind the scenes of the Time Variance Authority.

But he tells Variety he saw the character as a callback to one he was known for when he was a child actor.

Quan explains, “In the process of trying to fine tune how I want to play him, something dawned on me. I realized that this character is familiar to me. I think I know who he is. I have to go back 35 years ago, when I [played] Data on The Goonies.”

He adds, “So many fans have come up to me, and the most asked question was, ‘Will there be a Goonies 2? And what is Data doing as an adult?’ This character of Ouroboros is kind of my answer to that. I view him as a variant of Data.”

As the cherry on top, he discovered the TVA set, built in London’s historic Pinewood Studios, was erected on the stage dedicated to Roger Moore. “Now as we all know, Data loves James Bond. The character 007 inspires him tremendously. So I feel like there’s some cosmic connections to this character and Data.”

Data connections aside, there was his technical jargon to get his mouth around. Co-star Tom Hiddleston helped there, Quan says, teaching him his method of familiarizing himself “with every single word” in a mouthful of technospeak. “It’s just that repetition, but start very slow. I [used to] do the opposite,” Quan says.

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