In a perfect world, “Daredevil: Born Again” would be a substantial Emmy player. Vincent D’Onofrio would be getting serious buzz as a Supporting Actor in a Drama Series nominee. Ayelet Zurer would be in the conversation for Supporting Actress, and the man in the mask himself, Charlie Cox, would finally earn some Television Academy love. Despite some strong reviews, that might not happen this Emmy season. But Cox was in Los Angeles this week, campaigning and laying the groundwork for consideration both now and down the road. And taking into account how the first season ended, the second Disney+ season may take the series to another creative level.
Speaking to The Playlist yesterday, Cox was frank regarding what happened over the first season. Essentially common knowledge even to casual fans, Marvel Studios brought back Daredevil after the television rights reverted from the original Netflix deal. Originally, the idea was to showcase an MCU version of the character. Showrunners were hired to facilitate this vision, but Cox and D’Onofrio, who portrays Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin, were increasingly concerned over the creative direction. The WGA and SAG strikes of 2023 provided an unexpected opportunity for everyone to reflect on what had been shot so far and to consider returning to the darker direction of the original acclaimed seasons shepherded for Netflix from 2015-2018. A year after the original “Born Again” shoot, new episodes and scenes were shot under the direction of showrunner Dario Scardapane. And somehow, the “Frankenstein-ed” season, as Cox calls it, worked.
Now, Cox and his colleagues are in the middle of shooting “Daredevil: Born Again” season two. And upon his return to New York, he still has several episodes to go, but, more importantly, he’s genuinely excited about what they have shot so far.
“I don’t want to oversell it. I do happen to think it’s some of the best writing we’ve ever had on this show,” Cox says. “I am sure everyone always says that. I texted the showrunner, Dario, the other day and was like, ‘Obviously we’re still halfway through shooting it, but huge, huge credit to what you’ve pieced together here.’ He’s done something which I’m really excited about, which is that he’s fleshed out characters that in the previous iteration of the show often get left behind. So, it feels much more like an ensemble than it’s ever felt.”
Cox continues, “And what I like about that is, one, I just think there’s more for an audience to invest into, but also it also makes my journey more interesting, I think because the more that you can remain a mystery as Daredevils Matt Murdorck, the more that you can kind of be skirting the edges in a narrative, the more that I think that infuses the show with a sense of mysticism and excitement and feeling on edge and unsure of what he’s thinking and where he’s going to go. When you have too much Daredevil, Matt Murdock material, you’re telegraphing all the time what he’s thinking, where he’s going. So, what I’m really excited about this show is that he’s slightly more in the periphery, and you’re just watching him almost like a chess game, trying to figure out what the next move is. So yeah, Dario is a real, really extraordinary talent. We’re very lucky to have him. I think this is going to be a good season.”
Throughout our discussion, Cox goes in-depth into how the show found its voice, discusses his reaction to the love for the new season, reveals the episode he thought didn’t fit but fans love, how Matt Murdock has changed all these years later, and much, much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
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The Playlist: Congratulations on the season. It is quite fantastic considering everything you guys went through just to make this season. How are you feeling about the reaction, not just from critics, but from the fans?
Charlie Cox: Oh man. I still kind of feel like I’m in a Twilight Zone around it. I genuinely was concerned, I can’t emphasize enough what our new showrunner, Dario Scardapane, and our Marvel producers, Sana Amanat, did to kind of put this thing together. I mean, obviously you clearly know that we shot a bunch. Then we went on strike, we came back, we changed directions. We wrote a new pilot, we wrote a new finale. They Frankenstein-ed the thing together, and I knew we had some good material. I knew that Vincent and I had worked really hard to maintain the integrity of what we’d done over on Netflix all those years ago. So, I knew we had some good stuff, but really credit to the editors and the producers for having the vision to see where the changes needed to be and being able to execute them. So, I’m like, I’m just thrilled. I’m thrilled because now we get to do it again.
The strike happens, you guys have to stop shooting. Had you and Vincent already had conversations like, “Hey, this feels off”?
Yeah, we had, and a bit like how you just kind of said it, we very respectfully, very trying to kind of be open-minded to the new direction we were going in. But I think what we were trying to vocalize was, “Are we sure we want to alienate some of the fans by not giving them what we know they love?” The elements of the show and the elements of the character, particularly the dark tone. We’d learned that that was a hit. That struck a chord with people, particularly with these characters. And so it felt foolish to almost go backwards, as it were, and we always understood what we were trying to achieve. And then I just think that ironically, the strike, which of course was so terrible for so many people, ended up being such a gift for us. Ironically, it gave the producers the opportunity to look at what we had and go, “We actually have got time and we’ve got the ability to make it. To pivot here.”
You’ve worked in television for a while. You’ve worked on other shows and know this doesn’t happen very often. Were you concerned that, potentially, you would’ve come back and it would’ve been not the same? Were you concerned at all that Marvel wouldn’t take your guys’ concerns legitimately?
No, I never had that. My experience with Marvel has always been start to finish, that maybe more than any other studio I’ve worked with, they value the input of the actors as much as anyone. And even Kevin Feige has on numerous occasions called me and said, “What do you think? What’s working for you? What’s not?” Which is shocking to me because I always think, particularly with a company like Marvel, I always think they’ve got it all mapped out and they know exactly where it’s all going, what they want. And I think probably the reason they have such huge success is because they’re quite flexible and they do want to be guided as well as guide. So no, I never felt like they were going to let us fail completely or anything like that, but I didn’t imagine that they’d be willing to make such a huge u-turn. Obviously, that’s not cheap.
Do you remember when he came on board, or having a conversation, or getting scripts where, I don’t want to say you had a sigh of relief, but you went, “O.K., this is maybe a better direction.“
Yes. And not to say anything about our previous runners who were tremendous writers and didn’t, but they had been hired to do a very specific job, and it was then decided that that direction was not the right direction. So, it made sense therefore to kind of hire someone who was more closely related to the Marvel Universe, particularly in the Marvel Netflix days where the serialized element of it was familiar to them.
I don’t want to dwell on this…
I dunno if this is of interest, but I will say this amongst all of this, there was one episode we didn’t change at all. It’s the episode in the bank [“With Interest”], and that was part of the original [shoot]. We shot that before the strike. That was part of the original, and just for my money, I wasn’t into it. I didn’t like it. It was my least favorite of the episodes, and I kind of pushed back against it as much as I felt was possible. I said, “I don’t believe in a bank heist in 2025. That feels like a 1970s game. Too much technology these days for that to work.” And also, I didn’t think the actual device used for the theft was sophisticated enough. I really pushed back on the episode, and yet I hear from so many people that they love that episode. So, it just goes to show you just don’t know. It’s so subjective. Everyone’s taste is different. And I’ve heard that that episode is one of the highest-rated. Internally, when they do their ratings, it’s one of the highest-rated Disney shows that they’ve had.
