This story contains spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again” Episodes 1 and 2.
It’s been nearly seven years since audiences saw Wilson Fisk and Matt Murdock come to blows for the last time in Netflix’s “Daredevil.” The bloody brawl concluded with the crime lord heading back to prison after losing the fight to the Man Without Fear.
These longtime adversaries are reunited in “Daredevil: Born Again,” out now on Disney+, which continues their tangled story. And while the show starts with both men having seemingly given up their darker alter egos, it’s also clear that there has been no love lost between them.
“Fisk is on a journey,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, who portrays the man also known as Kingpin, during a recent phone interview. “He wants to expand his reach. … He’s going to get more control, and it’s going to be dangerous. It’s not going to be good for anybody.”
Since the conclusion of “Daredevil” in 2018, the mob boss has appeared in Marvel television shows “Hawkeye” (2021) and “Echo” (2024) as a mentor and father figure to Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), also known as Echo. But in “Born Again,” which picks up after the events of the two series, Fisk insists that his life of crime is behind him as he becomes the newly elected mayor of New York.
Murdock (Charlie Cox), meanwhile, also has hung up his horns, choosing to seek justice as a lawyer instead of as the masked vigilante Daredevil. (Murdock’s previous MCU appearances include 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the TV shows “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” and “Echo.”)
During “Born Again’s” first season, audiences will be “reminded how cunning [Fisk is] and how much of a team Vanessa and him make,” says D’Onofrio. “There’s no stopping this guy. He’s a broken man with a lot of power; he’s not gonna stop.”
D’Onofrio discusses Fisk and Murdock’s reunion and Fisk’s marriage woes in the conversation (edited for clarity and length) below.
What was it like shooting that diner scene and being opposite Matt Murdock again?
We were well prepared for that scene because we were involved in the writing of it with [showrunner] Dario [Scardapane]. Charlie and I, we work together on a lot of our notes — just overall notes for every episode kind of thing — and then we narrow in on our own parts. But mostly we collaborate on story, and then we take it to them together, to the writer and to everybody else. So we went into that scene with a big dialogue with Justin [Benson] and Aaron [Moorhead], the two directors, and Dario, and kind of just worked it out for a few hours and changed a bit of it here and there. We liked the levity in it. The fact that these two could have a weird laugh together and almost seem like friends, but there’s this underlying feeling that they’re not friends at all.
What about Fisk’s journey this season has been most interesting to you?
The most interesting thing for me as an actor — not just playing Kingpin but as an actor — is to take a character, a character written as well [as] they’ve written him in the past and up to now who’s just bats— crazy, a character that’s that broken and that narcissistic, and put him in typical domestic situations like a marriage, marriage therapy even. The metaphor would be a vampire trying to live in the daylight. It’s a struggle. It’s a really interesting situation to have a character like [Fisk] and put him in domestic situations where he has to struggle, because the only way that he can expand his reach is to participate in the world. It’s the most fun I’m having when we’ve tried to put this guy in domestic situations.
Speaking of domestic situations and marriage therapy, what can you say about Fisk and Vanessa’s relationship this season?
I think that he has a lot of explaining to do. The other shows that I did, “Hawkeye” and then “Echo,” led to an absence in my marriage. I disappeared without telling the character of Vanessa anything about where I was and what happened. So when he arrives back, he has some explaining to do, and she has some things to say.
The marriage therapy stuff is really fun. I’ve known Ayelet Zurer for a long time now. We’re like brother and sister. We’re both Cancers. We’ve always gotten along from the moment we met 10 years ago, and we’ve just remained really close. She’s so brilliant. I just think that she holds herself the way a modern woman should — she’s just so powerful and so smart, and the character that she’s playing is the same.
We trust each other a lot, so when she’s talking to me in a scene, all I have to do is just stay open and receive her, and I get emotional, like you would with a friend. It’s an intense marriage, this thing that they’ve written, so we have to play it as honest as we can, otherwise nobody will buy it. It’s a really intense, emotional time, and there’s a lot of tears and a lot of emotional reactions to each other. There were times when the cameras were rolling that I felt like I was in therapy with somebody that I cared about a lot, and I had some explaining to do.
The post Vincent D’Onofrio breaks down the ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ reunion we’ve all been waiting for appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
