Sophia Di Martino

Watch how Sylvie hits people in Loki. Tom Hiddleston's god fights like a fencer; Sophia Di Martino's Variant fights like someone who has settled a lot of arguments in car parks, all shoulder and elbow and no interest in looking good. She has said the style was deliberate: "not elegant like Loki, not balletic like Loki, but just sort of like brute force and just loves beating people." It is the character in one line, and it is close to the actor's instinct. She plays people who have stopped performing for anyone.

She got there slowly. From 2004 she did the small television parts nobody remembers, then three years as Polly Emmerson on Casualty (2009–2011), which is a long time to spend being competent in a corridor. The turn was Flowers (2016–2018), Will Sharpe's dark comedy about a family coming apart, in which she played Amy. We have not reviewed it, so we will not weigh it, but it is the performance people kept mentioning when Loki arrived, and by her own account it was the first part she had space to build with a writer. Supporting work followed in Danny Boyle's Yesterday (2019), as Carol, and in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), as Judith. Then came Loki.

Our reservations about Loki have almost nothing to do with her. The series stops nearly every episode so somebody can explain how time works this week. Sylvie is the one person in it with no patience for anybody's rules, and Di Martino gives her a flat, tired anger that suits the part exactly. We found her the most restful thing on screen: while the others queued up to describe the machine, she sat there looking as if she had heard it all before and did not believe a word. It made us like her, and it made us a little cross with the writers on her behalf, because by the second season the show hands her less to do each week than it hands Hiddleston. The anger stays; the reasons for it get thinner.

What she does that others in that kind of series do not is keep the person intact while the stunts happen; the brawling never turns her into a costume. It helps that she has kept a small company around her. Sharpe has worked with her four times, Kate Herron has directed her twice, and she writes and directs short films of her own. Peacock (2022–2024) and The Radleys (2024) came after Loki; we have not reviewed either, so we will say only that the parts keep coming. The pattern so far is plain enough: she is best when somebody writes to her rather than around her. Sharpe did it; Loki managed it for about a season. What we would like next is a lead with nothing to explain.