Meet Daredevil, TV’s emo superhero

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/10/daredevil-tv-emo-superhero

Version 0 of 1.

Related: Netflix bets on Marvel and Tina Fey as it unveils a slate of new shows

The recently incorporated law firm of Nelson & Murdock operates out of a shabby office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. The cardboard sign on the door is a rushed scrawl, the furniture is the sad kind of vintage and the dusty fax machine looks like it was last functional in 1994. If this is part of the Marvel universe, it’s a few rungs down from the luxe interiors and floating screens so beloved of Tony Stark. But Matt Murdock – blind lawyer by day, fledgling vigilante by night – is a very different sort of hero from Iron Man.

The view out of the office window might be fake, but we really are in New York: the production base for Daredevil, Netflix’s plucky foray into comic-book TV, is in Queens. For English actor Charlie Cox, the former Boardwalk Empire agitator now embodying the Marvel hero long-billed as The Man Without Fear, the city has become his home both onscreen and off. Cox seems to be enjoying it. “New York seems to attract Type A personalities; people from all over the world who have a burning desire to be someone and do something,” he says. “No wonder so many of them identify with superheroes.”

If networks used to suffer from cape fear, there’s now an abundance of comic-book TV, from fast-forward teen soap The Flash to Gotham, another show that shoots extensively on the streets of NYC for authentic urban flavour. But Daredevil is the darkest to date, an intentionally Wire-esque survey of gang operations interfacing with corrupt civic institutions, shot in a benighted noir style that feels a million miles away from the Jolly Rancher colour scheme of Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD. There’s also lashings of intense, brutal violence, a hallmark of showrunner Steven S DeKnight, the Buffy/Angel writing veteran previously responsible for the blood-soaked Spartacus.

So it’s a fresh start for Marvel’s most emo hero. Originally created by Stan Lee and artist Bill Everett in 1964, Daredevil was previously overhauled by a pre-Sin City Frank Miller in the 1980s, repositioning Murdock as a burdened loner. More recently, Daredevil was an unloved 2003 blockbuster starring Ben Affleck that veered between nu-metal angst and Spandex camp.

“Our show is aimed at a slightly older audience,” says Cox. “I feel we’re making a very smart, well-written, sinister crime drama that just happens to have superhero elements. Daredevil exists in a much darker world than most Marvel characters and that’s one of the reasons I’m not sure the film worked quite so well.”

He’s being diplomatic; the Affleck movie was a stinkbomb. But while Daredevil might not be as lunchbox-ready as Marvel’s top flight of heroes, he’s always been one of the most intriguing: blinded by a toxic chemical spill as a child, but gifted an uncanny “radar sense” which he essentially weaponises to protect his neighbourhood and avenge his father, a sadsack boxer murdered by mobsters after refusing to throw a fight.

Netflix’s series focuses on Daredevil as an emerging ass-kicker, facing off against the racketeers moving in on the regeneration of Hell’s Kitchen after it was trashed during Avengers Assemble’s climactic alien invasion. Murdock and his oblivious best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) set up their law firm to help bullied locals, while Daredevil, initially dressed in a homemade black proto-ninja costume, cracks heads on the rooftops at night.

Despite his radar sense, though, Murdock isn’t infallible, and he often requires improvised medical care from concerned local nurse Claire (Rosario Dawson). “I’m hoping we’ve made him very human,” says Cox. “He is a man with great pain, a man who misses his father every day, who feels a great responsibility but also fears having to answer to God one day. He was brought up Catholic, so by that rationale, he must think eternal damnation is a possibility for him.”

Heroes are often only as good as their baddies. Daredevil’s nemesis gets introduced like Batman: first as a forbidden name whispered among henchmen, then as a disembodied voice, before finally being revealed as businessman Wilson Fisk, AKA the Kingpin, an impeccably tailored bald powerhouse in the imposing physical form of Vincent D’Onofrio. “It’s always good to play a Harry Lime in The Third Man,” chuckles D’Onofrio. “If a lot of people have been talking about you, when you arrive you actually have to do very little to set up your character.” Unlike many comic-book villains, Fisk has no superhuman abilities, unless you count a preternatural understanding of power and the various ways it can be applied.

“Physically, he’s a big, strong guy but more than that he’s very smart,” says D’Onofrio. “He’s not one to scream at the obstacles in his way but he’ll figure out a way around them or through them. He’s extremely dangerous.”

Like Murdock, Fisk has an obsession with Hell’s Kitchen, albeit wishing to recast the neighbourhood in his own imposing image. A lifelong New Yorker, D’Onofrio can remember the bad old days: “When I was a kid, Hell’s Kitchen was not always a safe place to be. You could get bottles thrown at you if you were walking on the wrong block. Our Hell’s Kitchen is a kind of fictional look back at the way it used to be.”

It’s a fresh, grittier corner of a Marvel universe that’s undergoing its own form of accelerated urban renewal: Netflix has committed to launching four series spotlighting street-level characters, before teaming them up for superhero block party The Defenders. That’s at least 65 episodes, and Cox is keen to do more. “It would be wonderful to get another series of Daredevil in before we do The Defenders, but nothing’s confirmed. My hope is that whatever happens I’ll be back in the costume before long.”

Daredevil is wisely stealing a march on the imminent Avengers sequel, with all 13 episodes due to drop on Netflix at once. But from the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen, Cox is beginning to feel some affinity with the rest of the Marvel screen universe.

“Since we wrapped filming, I’ve been doing a lot of further Marvel reading,” he says. “I finished the civil war storyline and I’m not going to lie; every time Daredevil pops up in other comics I get a little bit of a thrill. God knows if I’ll ever be invited to make a movie with those guys, but it would be a dream.”

And perhaps Tony Stark could hook up Nelson & Murdock with a long-overdue IT overhaul, or at least a proper sign.

Daredevil is on Netflix from Friday 10th April