With Disney‘s new series Daredevil: Born Again, fans of the red-horned superhero can finally expect to see a new live-action portrayal by Charlie Cox, five years after the critically acclaimed Netflix series came to an end.
After much-lauded cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk, both of which signified the actor’s portrayal of the Marvel hero as official canon in the MCU, the Disney streaming channel has assimilated the hero into its own slate with a series that’s been dubbed as a “soft-reboot”.
Speaking at ICCCon Nashville, Cox explained how it felt to him to return to the character which won him so much acclaim: “It was really weird. And I’m older and so therefore he’s older. So I think it was important … for that to be a part of it. I don’t know necessarily what I mean by that, but he’s been through more.”
Cox also made allusions to the fact that the Born Again Daredevil might be a different version from the one seen on Netflix, with previous MCU titles introducing the concept of alternate universes and variants of characters. “He’s been through everything in some way. In some world, in some variant, he’s been through what we’ve seen or not.”
The show also sees the return of Vincent D’Onofrio, reprising his role as the main villain, Wilson Fisk, which suggests that fans of the previous Daredevil show will be in somewhat familiar territory with the MCU’s new outing.
Cox also detailed his involvement in She-Hulk, explaining how the tone was different to previous projects he’d worked on: “She-Hulk was really fun because one of the things we didn’t do a huge amount of in the original show — it was so dark so much of the time, he was so tortured that in the comics there was at times a lot of levity.”
Whilst attracting a lot of criticism and ultimately being one of Marvel’s most divisive shows, She-Hulk clearly gave Cox a refreshing chance at doing something different. He continues: “There was a lot of fun and he’s very charismatic and he’s very funny at times. We didn’t do too much of that. We didn’t have much of that.”
With the ongoing Writers Guild of America strikes, it’s now uncertain when we can expect Daredevil: Born Again. However, we do know that the series was commissioned for a whopping 18 episodes. With this being significantly longer than other Marvel content on Disney+, fans can take solace in the fact that when it does come, there’ll be plenty of it.
