Animation veteran Tara Strong talks crafting Loki's mysterious Miss Minutes
Raven from Teen Titans, Ben Tennyson from Ben 10, Timmy Turner from The Fairly OddParents, Bubbles from Powerpuff Girls — these are just a handful of animated characters Tara Strong has played during her long career as a voiceover artist. Now, as the voice of Miss Minutes in Loki, Strong's latest project is bringing her animation expertise to a mostly live-action story.
Unlike most of her voiceover auditions, Strong barely knew anything about the nature of the role going into her Loki tryout. But once she was cast, Strong was able to see the partially-complete animation sequence for Miss Minutes' debut and craft her voice around that.
Miss Minutes' role in the first episode of Loki is an important one: She delivers a lot of important exposition about the nature of the Time Variance Authority, both to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) himself and to us the viewers. There's an art to making expository dialogue sing, and Strong accomplishes it with the aid of the animators.
"It's a very collaborative process because of how beautiful the animation is," Strong tells EW. "Sometimes even the most simplistic animation can be visually so exciting to watch. Like you have this very futuristic world with the '60s or '70s type animation, and then the writing is interesting on top of giving all this exposition. And so we got to play around with different variables of how emotional she would get, or if she was smiling while talking about, 'Hey, you could die if you don't do this,' and all these different places that she can sort of explore while giving very vital information."
Miss Minutes' arrival was one of the highlights of the Loki premiere, but her role expanded even more in the second episode, when the little clock-woman suddenly popped off the TV screen and started interacting with Hiddleston, Who Framed Roger Rabbit-style.
"I just think it's such an interesting character that we've really never seen before," Strong says. "Certainly in that second episode where we see that she can become holographic and come to life and swat the desk, it's like, 'Oh, we didn't know she could do that.' And that's sort of happened organically with me through this process. In each moment that I explored, I would just sort of picture each thing that I was going through or thing that I was talking about so that it would feel very authentic and in real time."
Luckily, Hiddleston had already filmed his part of the scene, so Strong was able to base her performance off of his.
"When I was doing Powerpuff Girls, for instance, we would come in with massive storyboards where each moment was hand drawn and then photocopied a thousand times," Strong says. "Now when we go into sessions, we can see things that are in the preliminary stages of animation to understand how big a moment is going to be. So I could really get a sense of how it's all going to look and feel and what a gift to have already had Tom do his part, so I could play off him because every nuance, everything he does is so brilliant."
Speaking of live-action/animation mash-ups like Roger Rabbit, Strong says "there are so few, I think, that have actually really done it well where it's not taking you out of the moment. It has to be done so masterfully, so seamlessly. I think this version of that world and how they've designed it is unique and is its own living, breathing thing where they really have brought those worlds together. It just all feels like an authentic experience for Loki. And that means that they've done it right."
New episodes of Loki hit Disney+ on Wednesdays.
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