Interview: Dario Scardapane Breaks Down “Daredevil” Season 2, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Darker Kingpin, and Setting Up Season 3

At the end of Season 1 of Daredevil on Disney+, Matt Murdock/ Daredevil (Charlie Cox) was in prison while Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) is rising as the corrupt mayor of the City. He was cracking down on vigilantes and reinstituting law and order to keep the streets safe. Showrunner Dario Scardapane (Punisher) spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about the uncanny parallels between the show current global events. Although these episodes were written and filmed well before the real life events in Los Angeles and Minnesota, this may well be a case of the cyclical nature of political weather maps.

Writing Season 2 of Daredevil 

Comics have always been political. We built the standard operating procedure for an autocrat around the Kingpin. You get a hold of the media, you get rich donors, you villify a part of the citizenship, like the vigilantes, and you create your own police force to round them up. We did all those things four months before an administration was doing those things in real life.

After the finale of Season 1, we wanted to amplify the stakes and go deeper into the character exploration,

The best way to describe the end of Season 1 was that the villain rises. He gained control of the city, vigilantes were outlawed. Season 2 had to be the response to that, the rise of a resistance, the Daredevil becoming more than just a street level hero. He was becoming a symbol.

We watched Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows and discussed French resistance stories. What would it be like for Matt Murdock and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) to be in this almost romantically underground situation? A lot of those conversations started really early, right after we finished Season 1.

The story of Season 1 came out of a hodgepodge, based on me coming in late, and redoing stuff that had already been shot. Once Fisk ascends, there’s only one place to go. He’s got to fall. We knew we were going to topple Fisk by the end of Season 2. It’s about the rough and tumble of power. Who has it? Who loses it? Who gains it again?

We start off laying the groundwork and giving viewers the geography of the game. As we get into the individual stories, there were quite a few plates up in the air, so the pace picks up. And by the last episodes, particularly the last one, you’re in an action movie.

You’re at 100 miles an hour, you’re bringing together all the threads that you’ve spread out. You start on a walk through the city, and by the end, you’re getting chased.

Dario Scardapane

The Oppositional Relationship Between Murdock and Fisk

Both wear masks and costumes to disguise who they really are.

These are exactly the questions we’re exploring in Season 3. One of the things that we always talked about in the progression of the first two seasons is that they’re both hiding. Fisk has got this cloak of mayor, this cloak of legitimacy. He’s mayor Wilson Fisk and underneath the surface is the Kingpin.

Matt Murdock putting on his lawyer suit, and underneath the surface he is Daredevil. In Season 1, Matt is Daredevil 90% of the season. He’s breaking laws and bones 90% of the season. We flip the script at the end when he suits up again, but not as Daredevil, but as Matt Murdock, lawyer for most of Season 2.

That interplay is always fun with these two guys. When you’re writing a scene, particularly the courtroom scenes, you’re writing Fisk and Kingpin, Matt and Daredevil all at once. In the final shot of Season 2, it’s almost as if both men have been 100% their inner nature, Kingpin and Daredevil.

There are the consequences for that. One is in exile, the other is in jail. What happens when Fisk is in a place that he has no influence? He has no power, he has no money, he has no criminal enterprise.

And Matt is in a place where he’s not the hero. He’s in an institution that says you have done wrong, you are doing your penance. The end of the third season is the answer to that question about what are they when you take away all of their trappings.

Is Murdock doomed to be the hero? Is Filson doomed to be the villain? These are almost fated archetypes that they have to take on. You’re writing mythology.

It’s not about the suits. Daredevil is he idea of the reluctant hero, the the fighter who’s doomed to be such a great fighter that he’s always going to be used by the system.

Fisk is the Kingpin whose appetites are farther than he could ever reign in. When you sit down to write Fisk, you write from appetite, and with Matt, you’re always writing from rage against restraint or this roiling ability, anger and special set of skills that are coming up against polite society. You’re talking huge archetypes of villainy and autocracy in this season. The idea of having the city respond along with Daredevil was fun. This clash between these two men would now spread out into world views.

Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) Photo by Giovanni Rufino

Does The Justice System Work?

Matt is committed to the idea of law and order and a system of justice. There is crime, there is punishment, there is sin, there is penance; there are all archetypes, whether it’s Catholicism or the legal system.

Then he’s constantly running into a need to skirt outside that system. Fisk learned a long time ago he has no accountability. He could break the rules and get away with it. That’s the dance between those two.

Matt has an order, a code, a reliance on a system that Fisk is beyond happy to manipulate, to break. Fisk says there is no objective justice. Matt would say that there’s an absolute objective version of right and wrong, it’s not situational.

As we see at the end of this season, Matt’s now leading a mob, the Kingpin’s gone through a hallway enacting violence. The good guy’s done the exact same thing in this tale of two hallways.

When they meet in the middle, I’m almost thinking of the end of Animal Farm, where it’s like from pig to man to man to pig until you could not tell the difference. The two systems completely collide.

Daredevil/ Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) Photo by Giovanni Rufino

Inside The Writers’ Room 

We hit critical mass this season with the amount of plots and secondary characters. The lesson of this season was, whether it’s theme, whether it’s conflict, whether it’s context, whatever part of the toolbox you’re using, you ask yourself, how does it relate to Matt and Fisk?

How can we have them be the engine, the catalyst, or the reactor to what we want to say? Anytime we got away from that, things got a little rangy.

That’s a great scene. What’s its story? What does it have to do with Matt or Fisk? How do we get one of them to drive that scene? And one of the great things about the Wilson Fisk character and the way Vincent D’Onofrio plays it, is it’s like a planet.

There’s all these things orbiting around his machinations and the stuff that he does. As far as limits, now that we’re very much a Marvel Studios show, is we don’t have gods. We don’t have people who fly. We don’t have people who slip in and out of multiverses. Even if it’s somebody like Dex (Wilson Bethel) or Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), we’re always trying to think about what’s the grounded version we can do of this. Because the second we go past grounded and what I would call overly superhero, you feel it.

We start planning the season with the bones of a house or a skeleton. Where does Matt start? Where does he end up? Where does Fisk start? Where does he end up? What is the obstacle kind of in the middle of it? So once we have what we would call an action sequence. Then you put it over to the side because if it’s just action for action sake, it won’t work.

You’re going to have an obstacle in somebody’s way as they go from stating what they want, getting or not getting what they want, and having something in the middle of it. These kinds of story structures and story moves, are laid out pretty much first.

I come into the writers’ room with the one or two episodes already written. So I’ve got a running start. Wherever that first episode ends is where you pick up the top of the next episode and then go to how you want to land it, what you want to leave the viewer with, and where you want to leave the story at.

As this writers’ room has gotten more broken in with, the way that that happens is faster and faster. What do you want to see at the end of this episode? What do you want to feel? Once that question’s answered, we start building a roadmap.

We write the beat sheet collectively. The outlines and the scripts are done by the writer of record.

Some writers write Fisk’s voice a little better than others. So there’s always a dialogue pass on Fisk. The dialogue is probably the very last thing, all the way up until shooting.

[More: Daredevil And Kingpin Reunite In ‘Daredevil: Born Again’]

Thoughts on the Finale – Sharp Lines and Bright Colours

Final episode, final scene. People in cages.

When we talk about iconography, I said that comic books are drawn in sharp lines and bright colors. It’s not a place where you soft pedal things. The idea of putting your enemies in cages and the dehumanizing them is stark.

It was almost like the three little bears. Is this too much? I’ll click the dial two clicks towards too much. And six or seven months later, it was going to be pretty much dead on reality.

by Staff Writer

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