As mentioned above, Detective Loki of "Prisoners" isn't afraid to push boundaries when it comes to his job — especially in the case of the missing girls. However, the character wasn't always written this way.
During the "Hot Ones" appearance, Jake Gyllenhaal explained, "In the first draft, it was a character that was much more, kind of, straightlaced. He was much more, sort of, trying to find an answer." He continued by saying that he found the ways in which Loki searched for those answers to be the most interesting. And he saw that Loki could be more enigmatic, and thus, more compelling. Gyllenhaal continued, "I wanted to be a mystery but determined, so that the audience had two things going on at the same time."
The actor went on to note that this kind of evolution is just a thing that sometimes happens with characters and that it is of no fault of the original script by Aaron Guzikowski. Gyllenhaal said, "Sometimes you just add on to things, you know, and they become something totally different than what was written on the page, but still with the same intention."
