When Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio get together, it’s a mutual admiration society between the two friends and co-stars. When their Marvel characters get together, you can cut the tension with a butter knife.
“It’s not entirely unpleasant seeing you again,” D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, New York City’s former Kingpin of crime, tells his old enemy Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) in the premiere episode of the Disney+ series “Daredevil: Born Again.” Fisk and Murdock, the blind lawyer also known as the masked vigilante Daredevil, at first toe a peaceful line at a diner, but when the conversation turns from passive-aggressive to just aggressive, bad feelings arise again, with the Big Apple at stake.
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Yes, they’re arch enemies, but they also give each other a newfound sense of purpose when they meet again. “I’m a big soccer fan,” says Cox, 42. “My team is Arsenal and our big nemesis is Tottenham. The question becomes, would I want them to not exist? And the answer is no. I want them to be there, because I want to beat them.”
D’Onofrio adds that Murdock and Fisk are “very passionate characters. They’re struggling and they’re both broken, in a way. The metaphor could be two vampires struggling to live in the daylight.”
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“Born Again” (first two episodes now streaming, then weekly on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/6 PT) is a continuation of Marvel’s Netflix “Daredevil” series, which ran three seasons from 2015-18. The revival maintains the same sense of dark, broody brutality, though now both Kingpin and Fisk are ensconced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cox’s character had a cameo in the movie “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and was a love interest in the more lighthearted “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” miniseries, while D’Onofrio played Fisk as the supporting heavy in two Disney+ shows, “Hawkeye” and “Echo.”
For D’Onofrio, 65, it was all just an appetizer for the main course. “Our goal was ‘Born Again’ and for it to have that same feel (as) the Netflix show, and so I was really just sort of waiting to do that again,” he says.
The new series catches up with Fisk and Daredevil, who was responsible for tearing down Kingpin’s empire, in new phases of their life. Yet old habits die hard for these two. Fisk runs for mayor of New York City and wins, doing politics his way (and not always legally). And while Murdock retired his alter ego a year earlier after a tragedy, new anti-vigilante sentiment and Fisk’s actions have our hero back in the red leather.
“Matt Murdock is more of a lie than Daredevil is true. He’s the lawyer trying to function within ordinary rule of law, but at the same time he is deceiving pretty much everyone,” Cox says. Murdock leans into “the antithesis of what a hero is and can cross over into the darkness on numerous occasions.
“He feels like he is physically being pulled in two different directions,” the British actor adds. Working within the law while also fighting crime outside of it feels “authentic to him” even though they are “in opposition of one another. And that inner conflict, it’s ironically quite relatable.”
Fisk’s menswear might not be as colorful, but “what fills the suit is more interesting than the suit itself,” says D’Onofrio, who loves playing his character in fish-out-of-water situations, both political and domestic. “The more dangerous he is and becomes, the more fun it is to see him sitting and having lunch with his wife. The things they talk about are so odd and so strange because she’s just as messed up, in a much different way. But still they make a great couple because of that.”
Marvel’s currently in an election season: “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford) became president in “Captain America: Brave New World,” Fisk is running New York and neither of them are exactly heroes. So how do you keep the MCU from resembling real life when there are political divisions and divisive personalities in both? (Fisk’s story line, especially, reflects certain American leaders known for creating tribalism among constituents.)
“I approach him as a man first,” D’Onofrio says of playing Kingpin. “I never go into work that day thinking, ‘Hey, I’m playing a bad guy.’ He has all these odd things about him, but I don’t play him twirling my mustache or anything typical.
“There is a lot of us in our parts, and I think that helps make it different. But I don’t think about any politics or what’s going on in the world – only in the ‘Daredevil’ world.”
Both actors reflect on how they first crafted their characters for the Netflix series. Their bond has only grown stronger since then: “We trust each other a lot more,” D’Onofrio says. “It’s an incredible feeling to know that when I’m working on a set, that he’s somewhere in that studio working on (another) set. I know that whatever’s going on over there is good, because Charlie’s the lead and he’s not going to let anything look stupid.”
Cox recalls the filmmakers’ goal in the first season a decade ago that still lingers: “If you’ve just turned on the show in the middle of a season and you didn’t know anything about these characters, it would not be clear to you who were the good guys and who were the bad guys,” he says. “As an audience, you have to work a little harder to mine the good deeds from the ultimately nefarious ones.”
