AFTER THE BLIND CRIMEFIGHTER’S TV SERIES WAS ABRUPTLY CANCELLED IN 2018, HIS FUTURE LOOKED DARK. BUT NOW, WITH DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, HE HAS RETURNED — AND DARKNESS IS VERY MUCH ON THE CARDS…

WORDS SOPHIE BUTCHER

Charlie Cox returns as Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil.

“VAMPIRES TRYING TO LIVE IN THE DAYLIGHT.”

Empire has just asked Vincent D’Onofrio to describe the shared state of mind of his character Wilson Fisk, aka. Kingpin, and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, in Daredevil: Born Again. “They’re trying to be something they’re not,” he continues. To be fair, they’re more likely to be spilling blood than sucking it.

The epic rivalry between Cox’s masked, blind vigilante and D’Onofrio’s megalomaniacal, omelette-loving crime boss has been central to Daredevil’s success, ever since it arrived in 2015 and took superhero TV into edgier terrain. D’Onofrio’s right to describe Fisk and Murdock as nocturnal creatures. They are two sides of the same coin, one relentless in his quest for justice and the other in his quest for power, both inevitably drawn to darkness in the end.

One of the earliest Marvel TV ventures, though produced separately from the MCU by Netflix, Daredevil delivered three seasons that were dark, violent, deeply character-driven, and perfectly cast. “We got Vincent D’Onofrio playing Kingpin in our lives!” exclaims Justin Benson, co-director of several Born Again episodes. “We got it! We’re living through it!”

We were! Until 2018, when Daredevil was unexpectedly cancelled. “It was all very sudden and shocking,” recalls Cox now. But, in 2021, it seemed there was life in the old devil yet when Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige teased that if Daredevil were to appear in the MCU, it would be Cox playing him. Cue cameos as Peter Parker’s brick-catching lawyer in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Jennifer Walters’ one-nightstand in She-Hulk. Cox’s Murdock officially became MCU canon. But there’s only so much fun Matt Murdock can have defending web-slingers and exchanging flirty banter — only so much daylight. The darkness was calling. In July 2022, it was announced Daredevil would be fully reborn, given his own series with Born Again. As it turns out, he’d end up being reborn more than once.

NETFLIX’S DAREDEVIL WASN’T AN ORIGIN story as such —when it began, Matt’s violent moonlight pursuit was already well ingrained —but it did tell us how he got that way. The son of a boxer who was killed when Matt was young, he lost his sight at nine years old in a car crash involving a chemical spill, which enhanced his other senses to a superhuman level. The series sets up his ongoing battle with Fisk over all three seasons, with Matt exposing his criminality, sending him to prison (twice), and punching him many, many times. It also introduces us to the closest thing Matt has to family: university friend and legal partner Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson (Elden Henson), and client-turned-romantic-interest-turnedcolleague Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll).