Maxance Vincent
When he began working on Daredevil: Born Again, showrunner Dario Scardapane had the task of overhauling the first season by tying it closely to the Netflix series while also integrating what had already been shot in the original iteration of the show. For the second season, Scardapane did not have those limitations, and while speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, he states that, because they weren’t beholden to previously shot material, “we were like, ‘let’s let her rip,’ and I think we took big swings. We had a lot of fun making bold choices and then seeing them well-received. I know for myself, Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, and a lot of the other people involved, it’s really satisfying and inspiring to go out and try and do it again.”
To play in the Daredevil sandbox means exploring a rich, textured world full of incredible comic book runs, which Scardapane admits he is having great fun sifting through everything, “especially if you think about the tools that you’ve got at your disposal, or the stuff to geek out on. First and foremost, you’ve got Charlie and Vincent, who’ve played these characters for ten years. They’re so involved, even if there’s been a seven-year break between revisiting these characters for them. It’s cool for them to come back, older and wiser, more mature and having thought about stuff. You also have all the runs, specifically Charles Soule and Frank Miller, as a baseline. When you’re coming together to think about things like, “Fisk is the mayor of New York, now what? Oh, Matt’s in jail, now what? Fisk is in exile, now what?” it’s a lot of fun to draw on stuff that’s happened before and do a mixtape mash-up of it.
The super fans know every single Daredevil run that’s ever happened, every single moment that’s ever happened in Daredevil on screen, in every iteration, whether it’s the Netflix show or the movies. They know everything, so you’re always trying to make things feel familiar, but putting a twist on it, and it’s challenging because you don’t want to just rehash the same dilemmas or the same angst. We don’t deny that time passed between the end of the Netflix show and now, and the idea that things happened, people grew up, and tragedies occurred helps us build characters with these two.”
One of the biggest decisions he made in the last season was killing off Matt Murdock’s best friend, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), in the first ten minutes of the first episode. However, Scardapane explains that “The Foggy decision was directly tied to the Vanessa decision. The idea for season two is that both of them are fully themselves. Kingpin is Kingpin for almost all of season two. Daredevil is Daredevil for almost all of season two. To be who you are, what are the consequences of that?
Being these raw versions of themselves, they’ve sacrificed by the very nature of what they do and have lost their closest touchstone. In the comics, it was Karen, and there’s a lot of decision-making that went into that. In the original iteration of this, the one I came in to work on, both Foggy and Karen died off-screen. I was like, “We can’t do that. You can’t have the season one open with these guys off the board, and we haven’t even seen how much that hurt Matt.” However, I stand by these really difficult decisions that we didn’t make lightly. Taking Foggy away from Matt is cruel to the fans, and to Matt, taking Vanessa away from Fisk is cruel, but it stripped one more layer off them.”
Of course, there was so much to dive into this incredible season, and you can watch our full conversation below to see how Scardapane breaks down his creative vision for the show and also (slightly) teases what’s to come for season three.
Watch it below:
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