When “Daredevil: Born Again” was first announced, the project seemed like an obvious win for Marvel and Disney+: bring back Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, bring back Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, and let the two actors continue one of Marvel TV’s most beloved rivalries. Instead, Season 1 became a much more complicated behind-the-scenes story, with the series famously shut down, rethought, and overhauled before a new showrunner was brought in.
Now, D’Onofrio is shedding more light on what happened, and his comments are pretty blunt.
Speaking on a recent episode of Reel Rejects, D’Onofrio addressed the pre-overhaul version of “Daredevil: Born Again,” suggesting that he, Cox, and several producers eventually realized the show wasn’t being made in the spirit they wanted it to be created in.
“I appreciate what you’re saying. It’s a very kind of romantic view of it,” D’Onofrio said when the hosts suggested that Season 1 and Season 2 form a larger two-season arc about Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk accepting their darker alter egos. “It was really more about Charlie and I and a couple of the producers wanting to make a kick-ass Daredevil show. And then we realized eventually that the writers that we were working with didn’t have that in mind.”
The remarks are especially striking because they read like a not-so-subtle swipe at Matt Corman and Chris Ord, the original writers/showrunners of “Born Again,” while implicitly validating the creative overhaul that brought Dario Scardapane on as showrunner. D’Onofrio doesn’t name Corman or Ord directly, but by saying the writers they were working with didn’t have a “kick-ass Daredevil show” in mind, he is, at the very least, seemingly throwing the original creative regime under the bus.
Still, D’Onofrio pushed back against the idea that Marvel’s top executives were the problem. In fact, he praised Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito for backing the overhaul.
“We as a group of creatives had meetings with the bosses, and because those guys are creatives, they joined us in this endeavor to turn things around,” D’Onofrio said. “One of the things about Marvel, even to this day, something that happened yesterday when we were shooting the third season, these guys, Feige and D’Esposito, they back us 100% creatively. They give us complete freedom. They never have once told us to back off, ever. They just keep saying, make it better, make it better.”
For “Daredevil,” the challenge was always slightly different from other Marvel revivals. The original Netflix series built its reputation on bruising action, religious guilt, legal drama, street-level crime, and the increasingly intimate war between Matt Murdock and Fisk. Fans didn’t just want the OGs to return; they wanted the new series to understand why the original connected in the first place.
“That’s how that first season came out the way that it did,” he explained. “We were in a situation where we had to sort of crank what we had shot, reshoot some things, and start to make more Daredevils with the additional episodes that we had.”
That experience, however, apparently freed the team up going forward. D’Onofrio said that by the time the first season was finished, the creative team felt a responsibility to make the next season feel like the full-force “Daredevil” show they wanted from the start.
“When that season was finished, we felt obligated, and all of us wanted to just make an incredible Daredevil, straight-up season from scratch,” he said. “And we had all of this now history from the mayorship and all of poor little Daredevil’s problems to make a kick-ass season. And I think that’s why the second season ended up to be, I agree with you, pretty kick-ass.”
D’Onofrio also teased what’s coming next, revealing that the third season is already underway and that the team is trying to push the show in a different direction without losing what makes it “Daredevil.”
“We have a whole new challenge ahead of us, and we’re working our butts off right now, like really intense,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of action in the third season and emotional journeys as well.”
Later, when the hosts noted that they had not intended to ask any Season 3 questions, D’Onofrio added, “We are well into it, and we are trying our hardest to make it different than the other two. But at the same, it’s super ‘Daredevil’-esque.” Watch the full interview below.
