‘Daredevil’ Star and Showrunner Talk Season 3, Kingpin’s Return and Bullseye
“Daredevil” Season 3 just dropped on Netflix, and fans of the Marvel series are in for a wild ride.
As the season begins, Matt Murduck (Charlie Cox) is still recovering from the events at Midland Circle at the end of “The Defenders.” The trauma that he suffered in that encounter will fuel him this season, series showrunner Erik Oleson told Variety.
“He is broken physically, broken emotionally, and broken spiritually,” Oleson said. “A building fell on his head. He is not in a good place. He’s angry about what has happened to him and he’s got some issues to work through.”
“He finally got through to Elektra, but he walked out of the building and she didn’t,” he continued. “So he’s got very complicated feelings about how his good actions are punished instead of rewarded by God. He has a real chip on his shoulder about all of that. In the beginning of the season, he’s incapable of being Daredevil. He’s definitely in a downtrodden place.”
According to Cox, that beaten down attitude will have dangerous implications for Matt as he tries to become the Man Without Fear once again. “He’s more reckless than he’s ever been…which I think could be very interesting,” Cox told Variety. “A superhero who’s kind of at risk of harming himself and others.”
This season will also see Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, take up the mantle of the central villain of the series as he did in Season 1. Cox praised D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the iconic Marvel villain and celebrated the chance to work with him more than in past seasons.
“I think it’s a testament to the show that he enjoys it so much, enjoys the character,” he said. “I had more to do with him this year. In the first two seasons, so much of our storylines happened in isolation of one another. We were both on our own journeys and only at the end of the season do we come together. Literally, up until Season 3, I had only had a small handful of scenes with him.”
Oleson is the third showrunner on “Daredevil,” and he had a clear vision in mind of what he wanted the show to be. He described his vision as a tonal mix of the much-celebrated first season of the series and “The Sopranos.” He also said that he wanted to take a different approach to the show’s famous fight scenes.
“I wanted to have really great action sequences, but personally I don’t like action sequences where I know the outcome before it starts,” he said. “It’s dangerous on a show like ‘Daredevil,’ especially one where the titular character is the one doing the fighting, that the audience knows already that the hero’s going to walk away unscathed. That provided a unique challenge.”
And of course, this season will finally see the introduction of one of Daredevil’s most well known opponents: Bullseye, played by Wilson Bethel.
“Bullseye is one of the greatest villains in any of the ‘Daredevil’ comics and I would argue one of the greatest in any of the Marvel comics,” Olseon said. “He is an extreme physical threat to Matt. He can turn any kind of object into a projectile and he doesn’t miss…In the grounded, gritty version that we were telling, I very much wanted to tell an origin story where we took a real life human being and turned him into the character that everybody knows from the comics.”
“They’ve brought him into the world and started his journey into being a supervillain,” Cox added. “But because of Fisk and the way the story unfolds, there’s still a long way to go with that. It feels like there’s a whole other season of television of just Bullseye.”
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