[This interview contains mild spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of “Daredevil: Born Again.]
Dario Scardapane knows he is Public Enemy No. 1 among a certain segment of Marvel fans. He is the showrunner who last year killed off Daredevil’s best friend, Foggy Nelson, in the opening minutes of “Daredevil: Born Again,” a Disney+ revival for which fans had been pining — and petitioning — since Netflix canceled its predecessor in 2018.
“I live at an undisclosed address,” he said, laughing, a few weeks before the Season 2 premiere, which arrived on Tuesday. Then he turned more reflective. “No, fans feel really, really passionate about this,” he added, “and I admire and respect that passion.”
Expectations were high leading up to the series debut: By the time Scardapane joined the production in late 2023, Daredevil hadn’t headlined a show in five years. Meanwhile, fans had pursued an ardent media campaign to bring back the Netflix series, which for three seasons starred Charlie Cox in the title role, a blind superhero who fights crime by night and by day is a frustrated lawyer named Matt Murdock.
Disney+ ultimately took up the mantle, hiring Matt Corman and Chris Ord as head writers and bringing back some of the main cast, including Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio as the villain Wilson Fisk, a.k.a., Kingpin. But something wasn’t gelling. About six episodes into filming, the studio overhauled the creative team, tapping Scardapane, who had been a writer and producer on another Netflix Marvel series, “The Punisher,” to replace Corman and Ord.
Scardapane and his team scrambled to rewrite many of the plotlines. They shot three new episodes, including a new pilot, and then filmed for another 10 days to get the footage necessary to weave it all together. One goal was to bring “Born Again” more in line with the Netflix series, which the previous approach had largely abandoned. This included bringing back several major characters whom Corman and Ord had effectively left out, among them Karen Page and Frank Castle, played by Deborah Ann Woll and Jon Bernthal.
It also included bringing back Elden Henson as Foggy — if for less than 14 minutes.
“That led to a really strong reaction, and we don’t make those decisions lightly,” Scardapane said. Those choices were part of a process he described as “super-challenging” if also “kind of fun.”
Still “it’s been a lot more satisfying to start from whole cloth in Season 2,” he acknowledged, “and just tell that story.”
Season 2 picks up six months after the Season 1 finale, with Daredevil and his alter ego in hiding. As New York City groans under the boot of a newly elected Mayor Fisk and his Anti-Vigilante Task Force, Matt is busy marshaling an underground resistance. It doesn’t help that his ex Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) now works in Fisk’s administration.
In a video interview, Scardapane talked about the Season 2 premiere, the fan impact on stories and some of the eerie coincidences between the new season and current events. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Has fan reaction ever changed how you steered a story’s direction?
I feel like I’m part of the fandom. The funny thing is, to do the best by the fans, you’ve got to give them a good story. And if you give them just what they’ve seen before or just what they’re asking for, you’re limiting yourself.
Whenever you’re dealing with these massive amounts of I.P., like Marvel, like Daredevil, there are all these different things that go into the cooker. So, yeah, what the fandom has to say is definitely heard. It’s not the guiding light of all decisions. Nor is what the studio says or what I say. For me, story always wins.
Season 2 was being developed during a particularly charged moment that included the large-scale federal immigration sweeps in Los Angeles last summer. Did current events push you to be more consciously topical this season?
This is the thing that’s really, for lack of a better word, chilling: The raids that were happening in Los Angeles occurred after we shot the scenes [in Season 2]. We had sat down knowing that we were going to do a resistance story. You look at Nero, you look at Pinochet, you look at Franco, and the thing that’s crazy is they all follow a similar pattern: You form a militia, you identify an enemy, you bully and bribe the elite to get funding, you manipulate and silence the media. So there’s this autocrat playbook, and we dove deep into it in the writers’ room, and, “Oh my, here it is now, occurring outside of our window.”
The way I’ll put it is, comic book writers are students of history — so maybe next time you go out and vote, read a comic book. [Laughs.] Past is prologue, and the desire was not to make it as topical as it turned out to be. I take no joy in that, to be honest.
I know it’s meant to be entertainment, but do you also hope to spark discussion?
The attempt is to do both. Comic books are drawn in sharp lines and bright colors, but they can also have a lot of nuance. We’re trying to write a character who’s a lawyer who’s come up against a justice system that isn’t dispensing justice. And there are a couple of times where you see Matt in Season 2, having discussions, having frustrations, seeing the rule of law turned upside down. And I think those conversations are part of the entertainment, and the entertainment is part of that conversation.
Matt Murdock has been through a lot.
[Laughs.] A lot, a lot.
Where do you find new psychological territory for him?
When we came back to “Daredevil” after almost 10 years, we wanted to make sure we acknowledged and leaned into those years. He’s older, wiser, more mature. The rage that fuels a young man who’s lost his father is not what’s fueling him now: finding peace, finding redemption, finding legacy. This season, he’s built a very real relationship with Karen. Unfortunately, it’s love in the middle of a firefight. Can it last? So a lot of Matt’s dilemmas, I think, have matured a bit.
One of the things that we’re playing with in this Fisk vs. Matt thing is: These guys have been fighting for so long, and it’s caused so much damage. Are they about to realize that this fight is poison, and it’s not only going to poison everybody they love, it may poison the city around them?
Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio are executive producers this season — how has that changed their roles in the creative process?
Were they E.P.s on Season 1? That I don’t know is really funny but kind of answers your question. To me, they’ve always been executive producers; they’ve always been collaborators.
Vincent’s version of Fisk has some very, very specific speech rhythms: Wilson Fisk never swears, and there’s certain dynamics in scenes with other characters that if you don’t consult him, you’re losing the opportunity to make it really good. In the same way, certain moves, certain arcs, certain dilemmas, if I haven’t gone through it with Charlie, they’re not done. And I include Deb [who plays Karen] in that as well.
What’s in store for Season 3? You’ve said elsewhere that Season 2 closes out the Mayor Fisk story line.
Every time I say something, there’s repercussions. [Laughs.] So, Parts 1 and 2 of this current story, where Fisk becomes the mayor and Matt leads the resistance — that dynamic comes to a place that is inevitable. And no, it’s not the end of Fisk’s story in any way, shape, or form.
There are a few comic book runs that are part of the lore, and we take bits and pieces of those, mash them up and use them as inspiration. We’ve done that this season and last, and we’re doing it in Season 3. It’s all part of the larger story of Matt Murdock’s struggle with being someone who has such respect for the law and breaks it on a regular basis. You know, the story never ends with these two.
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