Maxance Vincent
With season two of Daredevil: Born Again having a clear creative vision after showrunner Dario Scardapane joined a series following season one’s creative overhaul, production designer Michael Shaw tells Awards Radar on Zoom that coming back to the series felt more exciting, because everyone was on the same page from the first day of production to now, as the series embarks on its third season.
Praising Scardapane’s vision for this season, Shaw calls him “a super visionary. He really knows what he wants to see, but it’s a contradictory view of New York, because Fisk’s propaganda machine really wants to coalesce his power and present a picture of New York that’s so much better now that he’s Mayor. The darkness is the undercurrent. However, on the surface, New York is better than ever, and that’s the whole propaganda machine working to make you think that the safer streets initiative is effective and everything is doing better than it actually is.”
In expanding upon sets that were introduced in the first season, the production designer discusses how Josie’s bar became the official resistance headquarters and hiding place for both Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), as the two are on the run from Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF):
“Above [Josie’s], we wanted it to feel like a magical journey as you go through another apartment, and then you go through a hole in the wall to another space that becomes the hideout for Matt and Karen. In that sense, Josie’s was revisited to become the resistance headquarters. We were very conscientious of trying to create a contrast between Fisk’s world and Matt’s world, which we always are. In this case, we wanted the attic set to feel very much like you’ve journeyed when you go through the broken wall. You’re in a space that is not like a place that you would find in New York, and some of the architectural details were actually like architecture. If you walked into a Haussmann building in Paris, that’s the kind of roof you would have. You don’t really have those in New York, but you wanted it to feel transported.”
Season two of Daredevil: Born Again has many pivotal dramatic turns, and a most significant one occurs in the fourth episode, where Vanessa Fisk (Ayelet Zurer) is mortally wounded by Benjamin Pointdexter (Wilson Bethel)/Bullseye during an altercation between him and the mayor. Vanessa is immediately hospitalized in intensive care, where she will ultimately perish in the fifth episode.
In designing the hospital room where Vanessa’s final moments will occur, Shaw explains that “it was really important that it did not look like a hospital room that we’ve seen before on TV. What we imagined was that Fisk had taken over this private wing of the hospital and commandeered it. Because the sea and the ocean in his mind is ever present, the space is standing on the beach looking out. There was actually a lot more that isn’t in the show, but I wanted it to feel like that. The hospital room is a shell, and so I built it in a circular way, so the ceiling has a lot of curves and I wanted it to feel soft. Fisk’s world is always very hard-edged and very angular. In the season, he’s basically created a bunker for himself. This hospital has to feel more feminine, more Vanessa. The rose is so important and the petals of a rose are rounded and curvy. I wanted this room to feel similar to that.”
Of course, there was so much more to talk about in our conversation, including the design of the Northern Star, the close connections this season makes to the Netflix show, his collaboration with Philip Silvera on the design of spaces for action sequences, and Matt’s return to the Church, among others.
You can listen to the full interview below and stream all episodes of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ today:
[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]
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