Tom Hiddleston’s trickster might be the title character, but you can’t have a TV show all about Loki without referencing his brother at least a handful of times. Sure enough, Thor has been name-dropped on plenty of occasions across the five episodes of Disney Plus’ time traveling multiversal mystery so far, but besides some archive footage in the premiere, there hasn’t been many visual nods towards Chris Hemsworth’s Odinson.
However, director Kate Herron has now revealed that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Mjolnir-wielding Asgardian has in fact made a cameo appearance in the series, and it happened in both the most and least likely place you’d expect. Episode 5 featured our first glimpse of a Thor variant, where we saw cult favorite Throg trapped in a jar somewhere beneath the secret lair where all the Lokis hung out before their standoff descended into a mass of back-stabbing and treachery.
Unbelievably, the modulated wails being let out by the amphibious God of Thunder were brand new audio recordings made specifically for that brief second or two of screentime, and Herron even got Hemsworth to provide the vocals.
“Throg, obviously, getting him in was great. And we recorded Chris Hemsworth for that, by the way. We recorded him for that, that’s new recording. That’s a whole new recording, not recycled, he recorded that!”
That’s the level of continuity and immersion we love to see from the MCU, bringing back the actor to have spent the last decade playing Thor on the big screen to have him voice a tiny frog buried under several feet of dirt. It’s the sort of the thing nobody would have even thought of had Herron not admitted it to the world. Such is the insignificance of Throg outside of fan service.
Clearly, Hemsworth was more than happy to keep up his track record of showing up in every project starring Hiddleston as Loki, no matter how small the gig.