Season one of “Daredevil: Born Again” ripped the mask off Wilson Fisk’s ruse and confirmed Matt Murdock’s suspicions—The Kingpin hadn’t so much changed or reformed as he did pivot into a new facade in order to achieve power, which he did as the Mayor of New York City. And when the dust settled, Fisk’s victory brought a new world order: a crackdown posture on vigilantes dressed up as civic order. This left Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), who’d spent the season trying to believe restraint could work, only to find himself backed into the same old corner—fight or cede the streets. But triumph was also a cliffhanger as Murdock’s Daredevil was seen in a bar, galvanizing new forces: the rules have been rewritten, but the war is just about to begin.
But don’t expect a significant time jump. In an interview with The Playlist’s Bingeworthy TV podcast, for FX’s “The Beauty,” Vincent D’Onofrio—who plays a wealthy villain on that Ryan Murphy-co-created series—said the show picks up almost right after the events of season one.
“It’s not the day after or anything, but, yeah, fairly close,” D’Onofrio explained about the timing of where the upcoming season two picks up. “It’s hard to talk about ‘Daredevil’ without including Charlie, because we’re both always on kind of similar journeys, but on the opposite side of morality.”
Asked about season two and where it’s headed, the actor teased a volatile time with a city pushed to the brink of chaos, and is ready to blow.
“We are both in a very brutal time in the city because [Fisk’s] reign has caused havoc,” he said. “And I think everything’s at a boiling point, including the city itself. So Daredevil, Fisk, and the city are all at boiling points. And they’re all going to meet. And it’s not going to go well.”
With the daily churn of unsettling headlines unspooling before our eyes, and an America that feels like it’s teetering towards martial law, ‘Daredevil can feel eerily resonant. But as anxious as D’Onofrio said he was, he explained real-world events haven’t bubbled over into the show’s creative thinking.
“I have to be honest. It’s never mentioned on set. Nobody ever talks about politics on set,” he said. “And I don’t look at the script and try and compare it to what’s going on in the country. So, having said that, as a citizen of this country, I’m very aware. There are a lot of issues, and I’m as nervous as everybody else about it.”
So while real-world allusions are there, for D’Onofrio, the script is the gospel, and everything else is noise.
“When I’m doing the show, the script is the Bible. So I have to figure out how to execute that first,” he said. It’s like,’ What am I going to do to make this work? How does my character fit into this?’ You can’t use these giant things [that are] going on in the world around you. It’s too overwhelming. You have to be very specific. You’re playing a human being. Especially Charlie and I, we have this chance to play these supervillain, superhero people. But yet we’re in a very grounded show compared to the rest [of Marvel], you know?”
D’Onofrio’s point articulates what separates this series from Marvel’s broader ecosystem: the characters don’t have cosmic distance from consequences. They’re not superhuman; they bleed, and they’re far more vulnerable. The brutality is there, but it’s secondary to what’s driving it.
“We’re more emo than we are superheroes,” he stated bluntly.” You know, we’re not from space. We don’t have any superpowers. 80% is all emotion, our show. Just all emotion. The rest is just brutality.”
So, in short, expect more conflict in a brutal, harder-edged law-and-order atmosphere, havoc-laden season two of “Daredevil: Born Again,” with a city caught in the middle of a vendetta that is undoubtedly set to spill out into the streets.
Ryan Murphy’s “The Beauty” is available now on FX and Hulu. “Daredevil: Born Again” season two premieres March 24. More from this interview soon. — Additional reporting by Mike DeAngelo.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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