“Why did you stop being a vigilante?,” Wilson Fisk asks his old nemesis Matt Murdock in the first trailer for Daredevil: Born Again. “A line was crossed,” Matt cryptically responds as the trailer depicts Daredevil’s cowl falling from the roof of a building. But, as the Marvel show’s tagline promises, the devil’s work is never done.
What made Matt Murdock hang up his horns and billy club (even if just for a brief while)? Daredevil: Born Again will explore just that when the first two episodes of the series launch on Disney+ March 4 at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET.
As part of this year’s IGN Fan Fest, our own Scott Collura interviewed Daredevil: Born Again leads Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil) and Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin) and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead about this hotly anticipated revival. (Yes, it is a revival. Cox says the new show is “100%” set in the same continuity as the original Netflix series, which is now MCU canon, with D’Onofrio going so far as to label it the fourth season they never got.)
Produced by Marvel Television, Daredevil ran for three seasons on Netflix before it was canceled in 2018. While Cox says he thought that was it for his time as Ol’ Hornhead – his Matt Murdock would later be brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home before appearing in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Echo – but D’Onofrio says he was always confident he and Cox would one day officially join the MCU.
“I just thought that we all knocked it out the park with the Netflix show. My sons turned me on to all these Avenger movies that the MCU was making. And I just figured there must be a bunch of clever people over there, they're knocking it out of the park every movie. Why wouldn't they recognize good stuff when they see it?,” D’Onofrio tells IGN.
While the Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again appropriates the name of a classic Frank Miller storyline from the Marvel Comics, Netflix’s Daredevil Season 3 had already largely adapted that tale for the screen. This Daredevil is “Born Again” for a very different reason that neither the stars nor the directors obviously want to spoil before the show premieres.
“The entire season, (Matt), and also, in some ways, Fisk, is denying a part of their true selves,” Moorhead explains. “There's an extremely pivotal event that happens, that causes him to put (the Daredevil persona) away. And the event has to be huge. It has to be incredibly important because it's going to change a core piece of who he is. And so, we wanted to make sure that we told that story right.”
Benson said one of the keys of the original show’s success was that it made Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk human beings. “There was consequence to everything. And it wasn't just in the drama, it wasn't just in the tragedy, it was in the consequence of violence.” Expect Born Again to similarly delve into the broken humanity and violent natures that Murdock and Fisk both struggle to reckon with.
However, Daredevil: Born Again was almost a very different show, having been greenlit as an 18-episode series that was reportedly more of a legal procedural than its Netflix predecessor was. In 2023, Marvel Studios execs reviewed the footage of what had been shot thus far and decided to reverse course about halfway through production. Punisher’s Dario Scardapane took over as showrunner, replacing head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman. At the same time, Benson and Moorhead – who previously directed episodes of Loki and Moon Knight – were brought in to direct what became a creative reboot. The episode count of the season was also trimmed from eighteen, half-hour episodes down to nine hour-long ones. (A potential second season of Born Again could depict parts of the original story that were dropped in the overhaul.)
“It's no secret that there was a slight shift in direction halfway through. And one of the things that we'd tried to do early on, which we have all discussed, and we totally understand, that an admirable thing to try and do was something a bit different,” Cox says. “We're lucky that we work for a studio and we work for bosses who were willing and excited to do that, and also able to see when it wasn't quite working and pivot. I don't know many companies that would throw the extra money and necessity at that to make the changes. So we're very, very grateful for that.”
Cox continues: “One of the things with the show in its first iteration was to distance ourselves a little bit from the history, just a little bit, maybe just to not reference it as much. And so when the pivot was made, and these guys [Benson and Moorhead] were brought in to help us bring all the previously-shot material together with new material that had been written and was being added, [it] was to tie the history back into the show. And so, doing that early on in the first episode, in the new pilot that Dario wrote, our showrunner, was one of the first things that was talked about and needed.”
Click to enlarge this IGN Fan Fest exclusive photo of Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock in Daredevil: Born Again:
Moorhead hails the “really specific tone” of the Netflix series – “It's really hard to hit because it's about people and it also is about heroism. And often, those two things start feeling arch if you start doing it wrong.” – as well as the supporting cast members, Matt Murdock’s friend and colleagues Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), neither of whom were in the initial version of Born Again but were brought back when the project was reworked.
Moorhead says it was important that viewers get “the feeling that you have in the very beginning of a warm hug, of seeing the characters we love back together, and seeing that they've evolved in some ways, and trying to get that out of the way. … It was really important because it is called Born Again and we're going to blow all that apart. It is a new story.”
“It's a new path. And Aaron's right, we blow it up, the past. But it's there and it's connected,” D’Onofrio concurs. “I think it needed the connection to the Netflix show. It needed the other characters to come back, everybody, it needed all the familiar faces. I think what Aaron just said about the warmth, that hug that we needed to create, it needed to be there. And the other iteration wouldn't have had that. It was a straight up, ‘Hey, forget what you just saw. This is what we're doing.’”
So if Matt Murdock (temporarily) retires Daredevil due to a line being crossed, it seems his old foe Wilson Fisk will slowly but surely draw him back into (superhero) action when he is elected Mayor of New York City. A decade of costumed vigilantes running loose on the streets has left some New Yorkers uneasy with the chaos they bring. That’s where a law-and-order candidate like Fisk – even with his checkered past – seems like the solution to their fears.
Fisk, we learn, has been struggling since we last saw him falling out with his protégée Echo, who he claimed to love like a daughter. The Fisk that viewers first see in Daredevil: Born Again may seem like a changed man, but once a Kingpin …
“I think he was trying to live in the daylight. And I think he'll continue to try, but I think the struggle gets harder and harder,” D’Onofrio explains. “But the guy is on a mission. His mission is to stretch out his reach as far as it will go until he's stopped somehow. And he's accomplishing that in this first new season. And there's nothing but badness that's going to happen.”
And when badness happens, a hero will need to be there to stop it. Truly, the devil’s work is never done.
Daredevil: Born Again streams on Disney+, beginning March 4 when the first two episodes launch.
In the meantime, we’ll have an action-packed exclusive clip from Daredevil: Born Again – along with highlights from our video interview with the cast and directors – running as part of IGN Fan Fest this Friday, February 28.
IGN’s full roundtable video interview with stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio and directors Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead will be published Saturday, March 1st, at 6am PT.
