Charlie Cox Talks the Original Daredevil: Born Again Marvel Abandoned

Daredevil: Born Again was once a very different beast. The revived series was originally conceived by Kevin Feige and co. as a legal procedural for Disney+ following its three-season Netflix run, using their already popular Marvel lawyer to go in a different direction than the gritty show fans were familiar with.

But Law & Order with Matt Murdock didn’t work out, and midway through production, Born Again was overhauled to better align with the Daredevil that had come before.

On the Happy Sad Confused podcast this month, Born Again star Charlie Cox reflected on both the show’s retooling and original focus, telling host Josh Horowitz that people love procedurals because “they’re incredibly addictive; they’re really easy to watch; they’re very, very well written,” but added, “It’s very difficult to write a well-written procedural.”

He also noted that there had been an “admirable effort” to change up Daredevil for the Disney+ era, but that “Once we got into production, it very quickly became apparent that the lessons we’d learnt from the [Ben Affleck] movie that we had got right in the show, we were now almost unlearning a little bit, and that the character really does work best in a serialized platform, but also when it’s darker and grittier and there’s less tongue-in-cheek levity.”

Cox then gave “huge credit” to Marvel for rethinking its approach and deciding that it wasn’t working. “It takes a huge amount of courage and money to make a U-turn like that,” he said. “We’re indebted to them, and they really did listen to Vincent and I.”

The Treason and Stardust actor has previously spoken about the conversations that he and his Daredevil: Born Again co-star Vincent D’Onofrio had when the revamped show was conceived for Disney+, with both fighting a more sanitized version of the series.

“The thing that we kept talking about was, this show has had the success that it’s had and has appealed to a very specific demographic because it’s one of the few superhero shows that is so dark and sinister at times,” Cox told EW. “Vincent and I both felt like if you lose that, you are at risk of losing the identity of our show. So we really pushed for the show to remain geared towards an older audience and not dumbed down to kind of capture a wider net of people. I think in some ways it’s even darker than a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past.”