Few Marvel series have inspired as much passion as the Daredevil universe has. When Netflix ended the series in 2018, it left behind a legacy of visceral fight sequences, morally layered storytelling, and one of Marvel's best hero-villain rivalries with Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk. The outcry over its cancellation was immediate and relentless—because when you create a series that good, people don’t just move on.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Daredevil: Born Again is not only happening, but it’s one of Marvel’s biggest TV swings in years. This isn’t just a straightforward season four—it’s a reimagining with new creative minds, a bigger budget, and an MCU-integrated storyline that expands Hell’s Kitchen’s finest into the larger Marvel world.
“We needed to come in hot. We needed to make a big bang,” Cox said to Complex. “We’re coming back after six years, and we need to shake things up.”
For Cox and D’Onofrio, the return is both familiar and entirely new. With Born Again, they’re revisiting characters they’ve lived in for years while exploring fresh angles, new dynamics, and an evolved Daredevil-Kingpin conflict that promises to be as intense as ever.
We caught up with them to discuss what it’s like stepping back into these roles after so much time, how the new series builds on their past work, and what fans should expect from Daredevil’s official MCU homecoming.
(This interview has been edited in length for clarity.)
Charlie, there was a time where you kept telling fans you'd love to return as Daredevil, but it's out of your hands. And Vincent, you were even assuring fans that it would be back. What's it like to finally be able to say, “We're here”?
Vincent D’Onofrio: Well, it's always good to say you were right, especially to him. But yeah, I just thought that it was a no-brainer. I thought these guys that make these MCU movies have been doing so great, and they were knocking it out of the park back then. Every movie they made was just genius and me and my sons would watch them all, and I just thought we did a hell of a job. Our whole team, Charlie and I, and over at the Netflix show produced by Jeff Loeb, and we just did well, luckily, and I thought that it would be a no-brainer for those guys. They must be very clever over there, the guys that made all those other movies, and I just figured they'd give us a call.
The showrunner said that they were willing to lose their jobs over Karen and Foggy returning to the series. When you found out that they were going to return in a larger capacity, was it a call or a text? How did that conversation go between them?
Charlie Cox: I was part of the conversation around the importance of bringing them back. They are the heartbeat of this show, and without them, a lot of the stuff that we do, it doesn't really have any gravitas. It doesn't have the same emotional impact. I really think that you need those two. They're great friends of mine, so it was lovely just to be on set with 'em again and reminisce and share in the joy of it all.
VD: Yeah, it's one of the things that confused us at the beginning. And why we weren't happy with how we first started is because it confused us. Well, are we doing the same show or not? And they would tell us, yes, we're doing the same show, and well, if we're doing the same show, why aren't our teammates back? And that just threw us for a loop, kind of. We didn't really get that.
And then we realized that the show was going further and further from why they weren't coming back, because the show was going to be unlike the first show and not connected to it. But then minds changed. All the creatives got together and realized that we had to connect the other show. And so that was a big, big thing. We were both very happy about that. We wanted them back from the get-go. And we are lucky that we work for a company that saw that like we did and did the best they could to make that happen.
Foggy's return is obviously a huge deal for the series, so fans are going to be pretty shocked to find out he's gone so soon. Did you have any initial hesitation when you found out that Foggy wouldn't be in the season beyond the first episode? And what do you think the writers were trying to accomplish with that decision?
CC: Yeah, I still haven't made peace with that. That's a huge decision to make.
VD: It’s brutal.
CC: It's hard. It's really sad and robs us of a lot of stuff. There's no denying it. But from a story point of view, we needed something. We needed to come in hot, we needed to make a big bang. We're coming back after six years and we need to shake things up a little bit. There was this great idea to have Matt put down the suit and completely distance himself from his former life. And in order to do that, there needed to be a massive consequence that took him to that place. And that's the collateral damage, sadly.
A lot of fan campaigns don't really work, but it seemed like Marvel was really receptive to this. What do you think made Daredevil feel different, and why did Marvel and Disney finally decide to listen?
VD: We have to give a lot of credit to the guys and girls who wrote the show to begin with. They really wrote an amazing show, the Netflix one, and we had all the right team together to make a great show. The acting gods were with us and we somehow pulled it off. And I think that that was a big deal for the fans. And I think as we were when they heard that we were being pulled, they were a bit confused. I think that charged them in a way that probably I would've never expected, never in my whole career. And I've been acting for 40 years. Nothing like that has ever happened before, and I didn't even think it was possible. But the “Save Daredevil" campaign was incredible. And they did a lot for us coming back.
We owe them a lot and a lot of the conversations, if not all of the conversations, I'm being truly honest here: When Charlie and I would talk about this show to the powers that be, it was from the fans' point of view, it was important to us that we didn't let them down. We had to figure out a way to do this show in the same way we did the Netflix show, but give them even more and have it even more emotional and at times darker than we've ever gone before. And the action needed to be more intense than we'd ever gone before. And that was the goal at hand. That comes from the top, from Kevin Feige down to us. So it was important. Very important.
The MCU’s always intermingling characters. Fans are already speculating about the future of both Daredevil and Kingpin. Who are your top three characters that you would like to link up with?
VD: I mean, the obvious one for me is my character was in Spider-Man, but I don't know if that's going to happen or not. Who knows? Right now my mind is on the journey that our show is even past this second season that we're about to start. I just hope that, I think both of us need to, we just want this show. It takes a lot of our mind up, our time up, and I think that's where I'm mainly focused, but I hope that there's other things that happen. We will be the last ones to find out if since that's true, but it's really only one I think about and that's at the moment.
CC: Yeah, I mean obviously Matt Murdoch and Peter Parker have been in a scene together. It would be very cool to have their alter egos intermingle. There's another group of people that I'd be keen to get to know, but God knows if that's possible. Right now. We're so fortunate to be making this show. We've got a great second season coming up, so we're very happy. But it's fun to know that those possibilities exist.