Vincent D'Onofrio teases ‘Daredevil: Born Again' Season 2 is ‘even more complex and more dangerous'

It took time for Daredevil: Born Again to figure out what kind of show it wanted to be. Stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio started reprising their roles as Matt Murdock/Daredevil and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in 2021, with respective cameos in other Marvel Cinematic Universe projects like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hawkeye. That meant working within the tones of those stories, but when the two characters finally reunited, their actors knew they needed to return to the flavor of the previous Daredevil series (which originally streamed on Netflix before moving to Disney+).
'Our jobs as actors are to service the story,' D'Onofrio tells Gold Derby during a brief break from filming Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again. 'It's my job to match the tone of whatever they're doing, because otherwise it'll look odd. So each time I played him, we got closer to the darker aspect, which I think really suits him — like, Echo got a little more gritty [than Hawkeye]. And so then we were going to do a show that was even less dark, but we realized early on that this wasn't working, that it had to be more like the original show.'
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D'Onofrio continues, 'so about six episodes in of the first season, we stopped and rethought things, and so now we're doing the show that we always wanted to do. We kept the idea that it was a shared show with two leads, which is different than the Netflix show, but I think it's interesting.'
D'Onofrio is right that both Fisk and Murdock each feel like protagonists of their own story in Daredevil: Born Again, and one of the show's most interesting elements is that they hardly ever interact. Cox and D'Onofrio only shared the screen a couple times in Season 1, and each time they did (such as their Heat-worthy diner conversation in the premiere episode, or the climactic moment when Murdock unexpectedly took a bullet for Fisk) there were explosive consequences.
According to D'Onofrio, viewers should expect that trend to continue into Season 2.
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'We're sticking to the plan where the more you put these guys together, the less interesting it is,' D'Onofrio says, echoing what Cox has also told us. 'But there are a couple of, to say the least, very intense moments between the two of them in the second season.'
D'Onofrio continues, 'It's sparse, but it's intense as hell. And there's a lot for fans to look forward to in the second season because it's, how can I put this? What we're doing in the second season, when we pair up Daredevil and Fisk in scenes, is even more complex and more dangerous than they've seen before. Some of the scenes that we're having in the second season, there's been nothing like them before.'
Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again ended with both Murdock and Fisk reclaiming their roles (and signature costumes) as Daredevil and Kingpin, despite what they told each other in that diner. They've each got supporters, in the form of Daredevil's ragtag group of righteous prosecutors, fugitive vigilantes, and fearless reporters lining up against Mayor Fisk's anti-vigilante task force. This is a change from the original Daredevil series, which reset its plotlines every season.
Though D'Onofrio is wary about letting spoilers out of the bag too soon, he confirms that Season 2 will build from there.
'We pick up where we left off, and things are just getting increasingly intense,' D'Onofrio says. 'At the end of the first season, he's declared martial law, and that doesn't go away. That gets even more intense, and there's a feeling of a resistance being formed with Charlie's side of the show. Aspects of that continue through the second season in very intense ways. So I really can't say much more than that, but the story continues to move forward.'
The prospect of a supervillain like Kingpin successfully becoming mayor of New York City is frankly believable at a time when Donald Trump can get re-elected president after being impeached twice and Eric Adams, the real-life mayor of New York, can retain his office after being indicted by the FBI. But Fisk's power doesn't just come from his office. Why do the violent cops on his task force follow him so loyally?
'It's very clear that it's harder to be good than it is to be bad, and that makes us who we are as people,' D'Onofrio says. 'Are we willing to struggle to keep our morality? I think a lot of us are, but unfortunately, there are people that don't want to work so hard. They just want what they want, and they don't want to work for it. They just want to steal it. So I think that's what's happening. I think that his henchmen on the task force are following suit. Fisk wants to stretch his reach and they want to follow because it's easy.'
But if the characters want things the easy way, the actors don't. After the creative reboot on Daredevil: Born Again got everyone in the cast and crew on the same page, they've all gone full steam ahead.
'It is a very hard show to do because you've got two very interesting main characters that live in the light and in the dark, and that's a tough script to write,' D'Onofrio says. 'So we're doing everything we need to do to struggle through them, get them right, and keep trying to do the best we can do. We're all working our butts off, the whole crew and all the actors.'
D'Onofrio continues, 'We're also super lucky. We have such an amazing cast of supporting actors. I've made a career out of being a supporting actor, and it's so nice to see these young people who are supporting in our cast be such good actors and really brave and trying to do all kinds of things to make our stories more interesting. It just seems to be gelling out really well. It's quite a crew.'
Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again is streaming now on Disney+.
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