Born Again’ boss on season 2, Defenders, Punisher post-credits scene, more

Daredevil: Born Again season 1 has now concluded, and New York City tumbles into chaos.

As mayor, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) took over the city’s government, locked away any potential threats to his power in a secret prison, installed his own shadow force of corrupt cops to exact his will, outlawed vigilanteism, and declared martial law. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is now the personification of that “This is fine” meme.

With what little allies he has left, the Man Without Fear lays out his plan to restore balance: he needs to build an army. Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), meanwhile, continues to be an army of one. After a bloodbath battle against Fisk’s task force, which he lost, he busts free of his dungeon cage dwellings.

With Daredevil: Born Again season 2 now filming in the real New York, and Bernthal writing a standalone Punisher TV special for Disney+, Entertainment Weekly sat down with showrunner Dario Scardapane to answer some of our burning questions.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start from the end of this episode and work our way backwards. Was the post-credits scene a direct response to the Punisher TV special that’s in the works with Jon Bernthal?

DARIO SCARDAPANE: No, it was part of a larger Marvel idea with regards to Jon, the Punisher, and keeping him in the world. He gets taken by the task force, and we didn’t want to just have him sit on that island. We needed to give you an idea that Frank is not going to stay locked up for long. It came pretty late in the process, but it became very clear very quickly that this was the thing to do both in terms of telling the story of Daredevil and what’s going to come next for Frank and the Punisher. 

Is it fair for an audience member to look at that post-credits scene and assume Frank is going to have some involvement in Daredevil: Born Again season 2?

I don’t know. I mean, I think that a lot of what would be fair to assume for an audience member is that post-credit sequence lays right into what the Punisher special is going to be. 

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’s The Punisher series, 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. I don’t know what’s going to go off. Jon I’ve worked with before, as you know, and I’ve read stuff that he’s done writing-wise between Punisher and now. He’s a really, really, really good writer. I imagine at some point he’ll bounce stuff off of me that hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t bug him too much.

With this final scene that we get with Matt and everybody in Josie’s, people have been gravitating toward the line that he says about needing to assemble an army to take down Fisk. The first thing that pops into our heads is Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Danny Rand. Are those characters in your head as you map out season 2 and the future of Daredevil?

Without giving too much away…when you’re working in what I would call the Hell’s Kitchen corner of the MCU, those iconic characters are always in your mind. The thing is that — and this is kind of hard, I’m trying to thread a needle here — you want to bring in people and relationships and past figures in Matt’s life because they help the story, particularly in terms of a story where Fisk has taken over the city. 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. 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. So the easiest answer to your question is, yes, those characters that you just listed off are absolutely in my head and everybody’s head as we’re working. 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.”

Intentionally…Luke Cage-y?

Aye! … There was a silly thing that happened, and I think I should address it: There’s a character who picks up Gallo at the end of the show. His name is Luke. That’s not Luke Cage. If you look closely, he’s about one-third the size of Mike Colter. Everybody’s looking for Easter eggs, and there are a few, but that was not one of them.

There was a very small detail: the score seemed to hint at Spider-Man’s theme music at one point in the finale. 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. So that theme being part of our story took me a little bit by surprise when I saw the posts on it. 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 in Daredevil?

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…?!” When people on high or people on other shows or people in other movies are interested in our world, we’ll get a like, “What do you think of…?” 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. Should we expect a comparable presence from them that they had in season 1 or are you thinking about branching those out?

I’ve said this time and time and time again, I’ll just keep shouting this from the rooftops, Karen Page is the heart and soul of Matt Murdock’s world, and even more so now that Foggy is not part of that trio. You can tell at the end of the season, she’s the one telling him to be wrath, you have to be mercy, you have to be there for your city. The idea of her and him moving forward into a dangerous time in New York, yeah, she’s a huge part of it. I think I can say that she’s a huge part of his world. As for Foggy, I am going to take the fifth on all of that with regards to the future. 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? 

The really cool thing about this show, and I can only say I’ve even come close to it once before decades ago, you have so many different people who are all super fans and are all really, really, really talented at what they do. So we knew that Matt and Frank were going to see each other towards the end of the finale, and anytime they’re in a scene together, s—‘s going to explode, things are going to get out of hand. The idea that it was going to be shot in two different ways and it was going to move in two different ways…One, the extremely violent Frank of it all; the other, the very, very choreographed, the very kind of ballet moves and non-lethal but extremely quick and brutal style of Daredevil. That was a real brainchild of [directors] Justin [Benson] and Aaron [Moorhead] and [stunt coordinator] Phil Silvera. 

We walked through that apartment set more times than I’ve walked through any set on this show before, and everything was calculated beyond. It wasn’t originally like that on the page. My original thing was Matt and Frank dealing with the task force. Then it evolved into, they’ve been having an argument since the rooftop in season 2 [of Netflix’s Daredevil]. How does that argument manifest itself when they’re both under attack? One of the things about Phil Silvera that makes him one of the best in the business, in my opinion, is that he’s always concerned with, what’s the story of the action sequence? This one, the story was Frank believes you put somebody down, you put ’em down for good; Daredevil believes that people are redeemable. And then that plays out with the decision over Cole North.

If you look at these two characters as the angel and the demon on your shoulders, it’s really the guy who calls himself Daredevil who’s the angel.

Charlie and Jon have such a great relationship and banter, naturally. So you really lean into that. As everybody knows, Jon’s going to do what Jon’s going to do and it’s usually really, really awesome. 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. Because of the Mayor Fisk run that Charles Soule started out in the comic books, it’s only going one place. When the Mayor Fisk run was part of every version of season 1 that they’ve had, then it became about making a set of decisions. 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. And with Mayor Fisk, the way that it ends in the comic books, we’re never going to do that because it’s a massive team up of all the supervillains, all the superheroes, and New York is essentially destroyed. That wasn’t really in our wheelhouse. So we needed to start setting up what the end game of Mayor Fisk’s reign was going to look like. 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…

The day that the special effects and makeup departments had the head in the makeup room, everybody had to come by and meet the head and talk to it. It was a geek fest. The best way I could tell the story of it is we knew that the Gallo character had to meet a really intense end because of something we had inherited in the scene where Gallo and Fisk are at the cemetery and have their tête-à-tête. That was something that had already been shot [pre-creative overhaul], but when we got our hands on it, the first thing that came up was like, “Nobody talks to Wilson Fisk like this.” So the version of Fisk that we built, if you humiliate him, if you speak down to him, you’re not going to escape unscathed. The more offensive and more rude you are to Mr. Fisk, the more intense the consequences are going to be. 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? 

[Nods.] Big thanks to [head of Marvel TV] Brad [Winderbaum], [producer] Lou [D’Esposito], [Marvel Studios head] Kevin [Feige], and the whole Marvel apparatus. All the gratitude in the world for our executive producer Sana Amanat. They didn’t put us in a box. From very early on, it was like, we’re going to have the Punisher end [the season], there’s going to be a level of violence that’s going to get a little further than what you’re used to. And they were pretty cool with it. When it came time for the Gallo thing, Vincent was involved. We knew that we wanted to go big and we were like, “Look, this is completely bats—, but here’s the pitch.” 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?

When he walks into that room, you have a pretty good idea that it’s not going to go well. There’s so many visual puns, visual jokes, little moments that are crafted from different places. No, Gallo going to the gallows was never an intention, but I think that’s an awesome one to pick up. 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. The funny thing is, there are things in season 1 — visual cues, themes, Easter eggs — that pay off monstrously in season 2. 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. 

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This article has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.