‘Daredevil: Born Again’ showrunner says Punisher’s fight with his cop fans was ‘a long time coming’
The Season 1 finale of Daredevil: Born Again, which premiered last week on Disney+, did not feature a final showdown between Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). That will have to wait for next time, as both main characters ended this season by assembling their respective teams and gearing up for a more protracted conflict. However, there was still plenty of bone-crunching action in the episode, thanks to the timely arrival of Frank Castle/Punisher (Emmy winner Jon Bernthal).
Bernthal’s Frank appeared earlier in the season, sporting a haggard beard and looking like he’d lost his grip. When the show was creatively retooled partway through production, with showrunner Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead coming in to oversee the final episodes, redo the premiere, and stitch connective tissue throughout the season, they weren’t sure at first if Bernthal would participate. However, tying the story back to the character’s relationship with Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) on the previous Netflix Daredevil show, as well as Bernthal’s solo Punisher series from the same period, got the actor engaged.
“There was a bit of a question of how much he was going to participate in the revamp,” Scardapane tells Gold Derby. “But then, when he and I started talking about bringing The Punisher back in vis-à-vis Karen, everybody got really excited. Then it comes to ‘alright, we're going to do a couple of really lights-out action sequences with Daredevil and Frank Castle.’ With Jon, it's always a collaborative effort. So, what ended up happening is that you have an action sequence that is a continuation of the argument these two men have been having since the rooftop in Daredevil Season 2. One of them, when he puts 'em down, they stay down. The other has a value for human life. So that became the story of that action sequence.”
Benson and Moorhead incorporated the story of these two heroes’ differing philosophies into the visual language of the fight scene.
“That fight in the apartment against the task force is technically what you’d call a team-up, but we had to shoot a team-up where they're not a team,” Benson says.
Moorhead elaborates, “We'd shoot only Frank in extreme slow-motion, and the focus of what he would be doing is either his face or the result of his violence. You’ll notice that nobody he shoots just falls off-screen. You see gory violence, and you should be disturbed by it. It’s not meant to be an exploitation kind of thing. It's meant to show us that this guy is actually destroying human bodies and lives. … Punisher’s philosophy isn't just, ‘I like killing people.’ For him, it's a brief reprieve from pain, rather than excitement. You can actually see that on his face. Whereas over in Daredevil's land, which was all handheld and steadicam, it's faster, a little more balletic. Still, he's technically losing the fight and getting overwhelmed if you watch it carefully. You start to wonder, is the guy with the shotgun being more effective than the guy with the baton?”
There was another layer of resonance to Frank’s role in the season finale. Earlier in the season, viewers had seen vigilante Hector Ayala/White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes) murdered by a man sporting Punisher’s signature skull logo. The finale revealed that the man was Cole North (Jeremy Isaiah Earl), a member of Mayor Fisk’s anti-vigilante police task force. This team is staffed entirely with police officers who had previously been reprimanded for excessive force, many of whom idolize the Punisher and his methods, just like many real-life police officers. Scardapane, who worked with Bernthal on The Punisher series, has been itching to tell this story for years.
“It was going to be dealt with in Season 3 of The Punisher,” Scardapane says. “It had been something that Jon and I had talked about for years. The Punisher confronting his legion of fan cops had to happen. It’s been waiting to happen in this story for so long, and it finally did. I think Jon’s really on-point in that scene. I don't want to sound too flowery, but that conversation would've been pretty impactful seven years ago at the end of The Punisher. It is even more powerful now. It's hard to get your head around how that symbol has devolved in the last few years.”
Even a one-man army like Frank Castle can’t overcome Fisk’s task force by himself, and he eventually gets overwhelmed. But instead of killing him, the cops try to communicate their adoration, which repulses Frank. Bernthal has been playing Punisher for so long at this point that he knows the character inside and out, and had a lot of insight for that scene.
“A lot of that stuff came through a two-hour conversation with Jon about Frank when he first got to set. Jon obviously knows that character better than anyone, and he gave us our North Stars,” Benson says. “He’s telling them that symbol doesn’t mean what they think it means. It's actually a black hole around society and the idea of violence being met with further violence. Frank is aware of that, but he's okay with being a monster. He just doesn't think anybody should idolize him or follow in his footsteps.”
The season ended with Frank imprisoned in Fisk’s new underground jail for vigilantes, so viewers should probably expect to see him again (for better or worse) in Season 2. That will eventually lead to a new Punisher special for Disney+, although Scardapane isn’t involved in that project at the moment.
“I'm so stoked to see how that lines up with what we're doing,” Scardapane says. “I haven't seen anything yet, but Jon and I have exchanged a few texts, and I can't wait. I feel like as we end season 2, they will be shooting the Punisher special in New York. I love the idea that it’s in our continuity, and I’m really interested to see what it’s all about.”