Daredevil Star Shoots Down Fan Theory About Beloved Character’s Return
Daredevil's Charlie Cox swears a certain character is dead. But is he lying?
No one can lie to Matt Murdock. Thanks to the enhanced senses he developed to make up for the sight he lost during an accident he experienced as a child, Murdock has hearing so refined that he can listen to someone’s heartbeat across a room. Murdock usually employs those skills as Daredevil, the diabolically-themed vigilante he becomes each night. But he also uses them in his day job as a defense attorney, sussing out when someone is lying.
But even Matt Murdock would have trouble making sense of a statement delivered by the man who plays him, Charlie Cox. Speaking at a convention in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, this past weekend, Cox smiled as he rejected a popular fan theory that Murdock’s best friend Foggy Nelson may still be alive. “But Daredevil heard his heart stop,” responded the grinning Cox. “He’s dead.”
Played Elden Henson in the Netflix series Daredevil, Foggy Nelson is Matt’s oldest friend and his partner in the struggling law firm they established. After the original plan for the Disney+ revival series Daredevil: Born Again did away with Foggy and Karen Page (Deborah Ann-Woll), fans were elated to learn that the characters were brought back when the series underwent massive reshoots and gained a new showrunner. Yet, that joy turned to anguish almost immediately, as Foggy gets killed at the start of the premiere episode, gunned down by the assassin Bullseye (Wilson Bethel).
In most of the gritty crime shows that Daredevil emulates, dead is dead. But Daredevil and Foggy are first and foremost comic book characters, and in the pages of Marvel Comics, nobody stays dead, especially Foggy Nelson. Debuting alongside Matt and Karen in 1964’s Daredevil #1, penciled by Bill Everett and written by Stan Lee, Foggy long served the bumbling best friend role, which often led to brushes with death. The end seemed to finally come for him during “The Devil in Cell-Block D,” the excellent 2006 storyline by Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, in which Foggy gets stabbed by an assassin. However, we later learn that he was in witness protection, and he soon reunites with his old pal.
More recently, Foggy was diagnosed with cancer and seemed to expire, only to later be revealed to have faked his death to escape the villain Leap Frog. Even more recently, Foggy went to Hell because of some magical shenanigans with the Hand ninjas, forcing Daredevil to travel into the underworld to retrieve his pal.
All of which is a long way of saying that Foggy Nelson has stared death in the face before, and he’s never blinked. There’s good reason for fans to expect to see him again in season two of Daredevil: Born Again, especially since Henson himself has confirmed his participation on the show. While that could mean that Foggy will appear in flashbacks, the high stakes battle of season two, in which Daredevil assembles an army of vigilantes to take on New York City Mayor Wilson Fisk, give us reason to believe that maybe Foggy’s alive and in hiding.
That belief has to come against Cox’s statements at the convention. “I love that theory, but it’s wrong,” he told the attendees. But is he telling the truth? Sadly, we don’t have Matt Murdock’s enhanced senses, so we’ll just have to wait until Daredevil: Born Again season 2 to learn the truth.
Daredevil: Born Again season 2 comes to Disney+ on March 4, 2026.
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Joe George’s writing has appeared at Slate, Polygon, Tor.com, and elsewhere!