Charlie Cox clearly loves the character of Daredevil and has been more than happy to return to the role, in cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk. And he’s the first character from the Netflix batch of Marvel characters – which includes Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher – to be given a new lease of life on Disney Plus. There has been some concern about how a character we’ve been used to seeing surrounded by graphic violence is going to translate to a Disney audience.
Speaking in a new interview with NME, Charlie Cox says; “My opinion is this character works best when he’s geared towards a slightly more mature audience. My instinct is that on Disney Plus it will be dark but it probably won’t be as gory.” He knows there are people who will be hoping for simply a continuation of the previous series. “I would say to those people, we’ve done that. Let’s take the things that really worked, but can we broaden? Can we appeal to a slightly younger audience without losing what we’ve learned about what works?”
Daredevil: Born Again has been given a massive 18 episodes, which is twice as many as the other Disney Plus Marvel series. “They said to me, ‘We’re going to be shooting in 2023’,” Cox says. “I said, ‘Great, when?’ They said, ‘All 2023’. I start shooting in February and finish in December.” Aside from the fact he’ll be in production all year in New York, Cox says he knows little of what the show will entail. He says he hasn’t seen any scripts or outlines yet.
“I’m fascinated to discover why they’ve chosen to do 18 episodes,” he says. “I’m imagining there’s going to be an element to it that is like the old-school procedural show. Not necessarily case-of-the-week, but something where we go really deep into Matt Murdock the lawyer and get to see what his life is like. If that’s done right and he really gets his hands dirty with that world… I think there’s something quite interesting about that, to spend a lot of time in a superhero’s day-to-day life and you really earn the moments when he suits up.”
While we wait for more information about Daredevil, check out our guide to the rest of Marvel’s Phase 5.