The five filmmakers — Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Michael Cuesta, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and David Boyd — had the unusual task of putting together a season following a creative overhaul, and it went surprisingly smooth.
Whenever a production has to use the phrase “creative overhaul,” one would assume that the battle lines have been drawn between incoming and existing creative teams. But that scenario couldn’t be further from the truth in the case of the Daredevil: Born Again directing team: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Michael Cuesta, Jeffrey Nachmanoff and David Boyd. Their unified aim was to simply create a satisfying follow-up for the fans of the preceding Daredevil series, including lead actors Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio.
The original Drew Goddard-created Daredevil series streamed on Netflix from 2015 to 2018, and on the heels of Marvel announcing Daredevil: Born Again in 2022, the previous three seasons starring Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil and D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin transitioned to Disney+. Daredevil: Born Again then entered into production in early 2023 before shutting down mid-year due to the WGA and SAG strikes. During the hiatus, Marvel Studios brass reviewed existing footage before quickly realizing that their six episodes weren’t scratching the same itch as the beloved predecessor.
To bridge the gap between the two Daredevil series, Kevin Feige and co. hired not only showrunner Dario Scardapane, who wrote for Daredevil’s sister show The Punisher, but also Moon Knight and Loki co-directors, Benson and Moorhead. Their goal was to restore the violent, hard-hitting edge of the previous iteration, while embracing more of the past and recalling several actors who weren’t a part of the first phase of Daredevil: Born Again. Those actors included Deborah Ann Woll (Karen Page), Ayelet Zurer (Vanessa Fisk) and Elden Henson (Foggy Nelson).
Henson, who plays Matt Murdock’s best friend and law partner, was originally slated to die off-screen, but the new creative team insisted on depicting that world-shattering death for the benefit of Matt’s arc. For Benson and Moorhead, the idea of killing off a fan-favorite character was as daunting as one might expect.
“We were looking at Elden, and we started to think, ‘What right do we have [to kill Foggy]?’” Moorhead tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But he gave us his blessing as long as we took it very seriously, and it wasn’t just meant to be something shocking. If it resonated out and was the reason that Matt did the things that he did for the rest of the show, then we’d have permission to do it.”
Overall, the new creative team tasked themselves with helming a new series premiere that says goodbye to Foggy, before putting Matt and Fisk on a parallel trajectory where they try to bury their alter egos. New eighth and ninth episodes were also written for Benson and Moorhead to tie it all together, and the existing directors of Cuesta, Nachmanoff and Boyd would either help update or coordinate refinements to their six combined episodes from round one of production.
Nachmanoff, whose original episodes of three and four turned into episodes four and five, became something of a Swiss Army Knife for the production. He even shot most, if not all, of Zurer’s scenes as Vanessa Fisk without having to manipulate pre-existing footage of Wilson Fisk.
“To Marvel and the producers’ credit, they did not attempt to drop in anything. I ended up reshooting all of the scenes that had Ayelet in them,” Nachmanoff says. “When I watched the series, I was pretty surprised that it didn’t feel like the hodgepodge that the process was.”
In 2021, Jon Bernthal told THR that he wouldn’t reprise his role as Frank Castle/The Punisher in the MCU unless the tone of his previous go-rounds was upheld. (This was before it was known whether Marvel Studios would become more amenable to R-rated material such as 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.) True to his word, Bernthal actually walked away from the previous version of Daredevil: Born Again over creative differences at one point.
Fortunately, Daredevil: Born Again had an ace up their sleeve in the form of Boyd, who was also the DP during Bernthal’s tenures on The Walking Dead and Without a Trace. So he helped ease Bernthal’s concerns about appearing during the first wave of the series, and then Scardapane, being a fellow Punisher alum, involved the actor in the discussions around his eventual season finale appearance. (Bernthal will also be leading and co-writing an upcoming Marvel Studios’ Special Presentation about the Punisher.)
Boyd was originally hired to direct the fifth and sixth episodes, but they ultimately became the sixth and seventh episodes, post-strike. He also directed the first Frank Castle-Matt Murdock scene, but it ended up in Nachmanoff’s 104 following the retooling of the series.
“[Bernthal and I] are buds. There was a little bit of hand-wringing before he arrived, and I said, ‘Don’t worry, man. It’s going to be great.’ So we let him fly,” Boyd shares. “There were some over-my-level discussions that were percolating down for a week or something like that. And because we have a shorthand, we cut right through all that immediately.”
As for season two, the fictional battle lines have now been drawn by Mayor Wilson Fisk and his Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Matt Murdock/Daredevil and his outmatched allies now have to find a way to overcome Kingpin with the entirety of New York City’s resources at his disposal.
“You get the sense that there’s a building of a resistance. So that is the kernel of where season two is going to go,” Moorhead reveals. “The board is completely set in which Mayor Fisk has now become Kingpin again, but with New York in his grasp, and then there’s this vigilante thing that now has to go completely underground. So that’s where we start, and we’re going to unfold all of that very, very quickly. It’s a resistance tale.”
