Jonathan Majors ‘Loki’ Performance Is Borderline Unwatchable

The moment that Marvel fans were once eagerly awaiting, a moment they’ve likely now been dreading, arrived in the most recent episode of Loki Season 2. After weeks, months, years of buildup, Jonathan Majors finally made his debut as Victor Timely, a variant of He Who Remains (the secret villain behind Loki Season 1) and Kang the Conqueror… And his performance is borderline unwatchable.

The last time we saw Timely on screen was in the post-credits scene of Ant-Man & Wasp: Quantumania, a scene that was just a clip from this episode. The last time we saw Jonathan Majors on screen, though, was when he was caught “breaking up a fight” in an allegedly staged video that was dropped a day before he went to court on misdemeanor charges of harassment and assault stemming from an incident in March. That incident led to Majors being dropped by his representation and a lot of upcoming projects — but not Marvel, notably. And all the while, more and more people have come forward alleging past abusive behavior from the actor.

Of course, none of this was known, at least publicly, back when this episode was filmed in 2022. That’s one reason why Loki Season 2 executive producer Kevin Wright said that the actor was not edited out of the season — even though editing abusive individuals out of completed TV shows is fast becoming an unexpected and unfortunate trend in 2023. But Wright and the Loki team are proud that the story they set out to tell is what we’re seeing unfold in Season 2, which so far is a wildly entertaining ride that’s doing a lot to make audiences forget about whatever slump Marvel’s been in. So no, the Loki team says they did not know about the disturbing allegations in 2022… But they had to have seen how bad Jonathan Majors is in this role.

Every appearance of Majors, always as a different iteration of the time-traveling tyrant Kang, was meant to be a defining moment in the present and future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the Loki Season 2 episode “1893,” Majors as Timely is given a lot of pomp and pageantry as he marches, step by step onto an old-timey stage to give a demonstration of his “time loom.” Any time a character is introduced in silhouette, you know they are a big deal. Majors’ character(s) are intended to be a new, unifying, Thanos-level threat for Marvel’s currently disparate slate of heroes, but what we get is a performance that is on the level of a second grader stumbling through lines in a hastily produced school presentation. Jonathan Majors is distractingly bad as Victor Timely.

This has nothing to do with Majors’ skills as a performer, but rather his apparent proclivity to make CHOICES, in all caps. His performance as He Who Remains in the Season 1 finale was also bizarre, but the chaos in HWR’s speech patterns and presence made you lean in. It felt unnatural in a purely natural way, befitting of a mad genius who’s been stuck at the end of time for who knows how long with only a hologram of a cartoon clock for company. It was a choice, but it was a choice that made sense in this heightened sci-fi world.

Victory Timely, however, is painful to watch. Embarrassing, even. Part of that is intentional and inherent to the character. Victor Timely is, to put it bluntly, a nerd. He’s a socially awkward mad scientist type who doesn’t get out much and has had his nerd brain exploded by the dynamite ideas kept within a TVA handbook. But there’s playing all of that in a way that fits the tone of the surrounding production, and then there’s whatever Jonathan Majors is doing.

Every line Victor Timely says is a pained experience for the actor, character, and viewer. Bizarre inflections are interrupted by peculiar pauses, like he’s Foghorn Leghorn doing a bad William Shatner. He reads every line as if his script was filled with nothing but ellipses and interrobangs — and this isn’t just because he’s giving a presentation to an audience, either. All of Timely’s cartoonishly awkward mannerisms continue off the stage as well. He is just doing the absolute most at all times, completely detached from not just the — admittedly absurd — reality of Loki, but the entire MCU.

Loki is the weirdest show in the MCU by far, and this season is pushing boundaries even further. But even as Owen Wilson is suiting up as Michelin Man by way of Moebius (the artist), or Sylvie is taking the reins of the life she lost by ordering everything on the McDonald’s menu, or Loki is making snide remarks about cartoonish carvings of his dad and brothers, the actors are playing their spacey roles with their feet on the ground. That’s what makes Loki work. Tom Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino are masters at delivering whole dramatic monologues with just a look in their eyes. Owen Wilson isn’t as subtle, but he’s not over-the-top. His time cop has Don Knotts’ goofiness tempered by Andy Griffith’s calm, all mediated by Wilson’s natural cool.

And then there’s Jonathan Majors, delivering every single line like he just saw a spooky ghost.

What are we doing here?

Majors’ turn as Victor Timely has to go down as one of the most distractingly bad performances in the entire MCU, an over-the-top mess that’s way more Batman (1966) than Loki (2021) — and I don’t mean that in a positive way. If this is any indication of what we’re to expect from whatever Kang appearances we’re still to get, presumably filmed between Majors’ court appearances — his much-rescheduled court date is currently on the books for October 25 — then the future of the MCU is more grating than grim.

The abuse allegations are already enough reason to cut ties, but this Victor Timely performance only makes you wonder why they didn’t cut ties earlier.