How Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio got “Daredevil: Born Again” back on track

Charlie Cox has unfinished business in Hell’s Kitchen. Six years ago, the actor had just wrapped up his third season playing Marvel’s blind superhero Daredevil, and he was getting ready for the fourth when he got some unexpected bad news.

“Season 3 had been well received and they had already gone to work on season 4. They'd pitched me a really cool arc for the season,” Cox tells Entertainment Weekly. “My understanding was they were really heavy into breaking that season in the writers' room and then just overnight it went away.”

As the years passed, Cox became sure that we would never get the chance to don the red suit again. But then came a 2020 call from Kevin Feige. Cox had rarely interacted with the MCU’s chief architect before, since Daredevil and its adjacent shows had been made as part of a short-lived partnership with Netflix, overseen by former Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb. But now Feige wanted to incorporate Cox’s Matt Murdock — and his nemesis, Kingpin a.k.a. Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) — into the proper MCU. First with small cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk, and then…?

Related: Daredevil: Born Again stars reveal how Disney+ revival will connect to original Netflix seasons (exclusive)

D’Onofrio was sure that their own TV revival was on the horizon, and Cox called him crazy. But now that the two are suiting up once again for next year's Daredevil: Born Again, the Kingpin is having the last laugh.

“I never thought it would be a TV show again. I just assumed that we'd done that, so maybe it would be something else,” Cox says. “So I was shocked when they told me in 2022 that we were going to do a show, but I was also thrilled. It's such a great medium for this character. There is so much story left to tell. So the more time we have to do that, the better!”

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To be clear, when Daredevil: Born Again premieres on Disney+ this coming March, it won’t just be a rehash of the original plans for season 4 — which revolved more around the show's connection to the Defenders, which so far has not been resurrected alongside it. Time has passed, and the creative personnel has changed as well. In fact, showrunner Dario Scardapane wasn’t even brought in until after last year’s Hollywood strikes, in order to retool the revamp after it had gotten off track.

“It had been conceived as more of a legal procedural, and we really brought it back towards an action-based New York crime story,” Scardapane tells EW. “The real trick was to have the DNA of the old Netflix show, but then push it forward into something very new.”

After all, Cox and D’Onofrio had waited years to return to these roles together. They knew what their fans wanted, and they fought to make sure Daredevil wouldn’t be sanitized just because it will now stream on Disney+ rather than Netflix.

“The thing that we kept talking about was, this show has had the success that it’s had and has appealed to a very specific demographic because it's one of the few superhero shows that is so dark and sinister at times,” Cox says. “Vincent and I both felt like if you lose that, you are at risk of losing the identity of our show. So we really pushed for the show to remain geared towards an older audience and not dumbed down to kind of capture a wider net of people. I think in some ways it's even darker than a lot of the stuff we've done in the past.”

In fact, Cox says that Daredevil: Born Again gets so intense that there was some debate over what footage might be tame enough to include in the recent sizzle reel teaser of Marvel’s 2025 output. The end result was a snippet of Murdock and Fisk sharing a laugh in a diner. In its own way, that was more shocking than even the most violent fight scene.

According to Scardapane, that moment came purely from Cox and D’Onofrio — not just the storied relationship between their characters, but also their own real-life history as stewards of this franchise.

“I am so ridiculously proud of that moment where they share a chuckle,” the showrunner says. “It was not in the original scene. They came in and sat down, we were talking about it, and one of them was like, ‘There needs to be a moment of levity.’ But we realized it had to be messed-up levity. We built that moment through rehearsal and improv. It was a round robin, and it became the center of that scene. That was them. How these two grind against each other is 100 percent the engine of the story. We’re doing a couple of really different things this season that have not been done even in 40 years of comics.”

Related: Daredevil: Born Again will have 'some of the most brutal action' Marvel has 'ever brought to the screen'

In addition to these two stars, Daredevil: Born Again will also see Jon Bernthal, Deborah Ann Woll, and Elden Henson reprise their roles from the original series as Frank Castle (a.k.a. the Punisher), Karen Page, and Foggy Nelson.

We’ll all find out more about what they have in store when Daredevil: Born Again premieres Tuesday, March 4, on Disney+.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly