Showrunner Dario Scardapane digs in to season 1’s big cliffhanger finale.
MARVEL
Daredevil: Born Againseason 1 has now concluded, and New York City tumbles into chaos.
Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is now the personification of that “This is fine” meme.
Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/Punisher, Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil in the ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ season 1 finale.Credit:MARVEL
Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), meanwhile, continues to be an army of one.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start from the end of this episode and work our way backwards.
We needed to give you an idea that Frank is not going to stay locked up for long.
Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle/the Punisher in the ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ season 1 finale.Giovanni Rufino/MARVEL
I don’t know.
Is Jon picking your brain about that?
I know he’s writing it.
Is he coming to you for advice?
[Scardapane previously served as showrunner of Netflix’sThe Punisherseries, starring Jon Bernthal.]
Jon and I shoot texts back and forth.
At this point, I haven’t seen anything.
I don’t know much about it.
I’m not in the loop yet.
Krysten Ritter, Finn Jones, Charlie Cox, and Mike Colter in ‘Marvel’s The Defenders’.Sarah Shatz/Netflix
I don’t know what’s going to go off.
He’s a really, really, really good writer.
The first thing that pops into our heads is Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Danny Rand.
Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page on ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ season 1.Giovanni Rufino/MARVEL
Are those characters in your head as you map out season 2 and the future ofDaredevil?
And there is a resistance and a rebellion, so to speak, rising.
So there’s going to be people, vigilantes, superheroes that are involved in that.
Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) on ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ season 1.MARVEL
There has to be because this is happening to their city.
That said, you also want to create a completely organic story for that.
So who comes in and why has to be beyond anything earned.
Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, in ‘Daredevil: Born Again’.Giovanni Rufino/MARVEL
How that manifests itself is both really tricky writing-wise and a pretty closely guarded secret at this point.
So I’m being intentionally cagey, but I’m also saying, ‘Hell yeah!’
in terms of it’s something we’re thinking about."
Sarah Shatz/Netflix
Intentionally…LukeCage-y?
His name is Luke.
If you look closely, he’s about one-third the size of Mike Colter.
The Newton Brothers seemed to acknowledge that on social media, but ultimately, they deleted their post.
Is that one of the Easter eggs you’re talking about?
I don’t really know.
That’s the best way of putting that.
Marvel doesn’t always share their plans with me.
And…how can I answer this question?
Honestly, I don’t know what’s in store with that particular character.
Well, Matt showed up in a Spider-Man movie.
So is it so farfetched for Spider-Man to show up inDaredevil?
It’s funny, though, because this is part of working in something as large as the MCU.
We have our little corner that is Hell’s Kitchen and is kind of downtown from Avengers Tower.
We kind of stay in our neighborhood until somebody says, “Hey, what about…?!”
And I haven’t gotten any of that on Spider-Man yet.
What about Karen and Foggy?
We know that they’re coming back in season 2.
I think I can say that she’s a huge part of his world.
It’s too much fun to give away.
Continuing our rewind, I wanted to ask you about this apartment fight sequence with Frank and Matt.
You took their ideologies and realized it and choreographed it into a physical fight sequence.
Can you walk me through the evolution of that?
It wasn’t originally like that on the page.
My original thing was Matt and Frank dealing with the task force.
How does that argument manifest itself when they’re both under attack?
And then that plays out with the decision over Cole North.
Charlie and Jon have such a great relationship and banter, naturally.
So you really lean into that.
So you give them room to play.
Was this a sequence that you crafted wholly in the post-creative overhaul of season 1?
[Episodes] 8 and 9 are kind of cut from a whole new cloth.
They had shot six episodes before.
They hadn’t landed the plane for their season no matter what.
They hadn’t scripted or shot an ending.
That wasn’t really in our wheelhouse.
So in many ways, 8 and 9 were about furthering that story in a way.
It makes me think, too, of this big character death that we get.
The prosthetics alone that went into this, with his jaw hanging off his face…
It was a geek fest.
That is the character.
That was the thing.
This is a man who put somebody’s head in a car door for being rude to his date.
So let’s never forget that actions have their consequences with that character.
Do you remember pitching that sequence to Marvel and waiting to hear their feedback?
All the gratitude in the world for our executive producer Sana Amanat.
They didn’t put us in a box.
And they were pretty cool with it.
When it came time for the Gallo thing, Vincent was involved.
And they were beyond receptive because by that time you’re there in the story.
You’re like, “Alright, let’s go!”
I love a pun.
Is it a coincidence that a character called Commissioner Gallo is walking to the gallows?
There’s so many visual puns, visual jokes, little moments that are crafted from different places.
I’ll take it.
A lot of the funny or [clever] the moments are ad libs, I got to say.
Once we get in and start playing around, there’ll be visual puns.
That’s the fun of doing something rolling out of one season and into another.
There would be things on a set or a piece of a prop or a character.
So all of those are part of the process of we have a team together that hasn’t changed.
Ninety-eight percent of the crew came back for season 2.
The actors are locked in now.
We’ve got a troupe to play with.
This article has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
