Disney+ series “Daredevil: Born Again” is renowned for its iconic hallway fight sequences, so it’s only fitting that the season concludes with another epic moment.
The episode follows Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) as he gets patched up and is running late to Karen Page’s (Deborah Ann Woll) trial after he was shot in the last episode. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva) and Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), both testify in the anti-vigilante case, but Murdock steals the show as the key witness when he reveals to everyone in the courthouse that he’s actually Daredevil. When Kingpin’s case gets dismissed, he’s sued by the attorney general and told to step down as mayor — but not before he incites a riot at court. He orders his police force to march on the courthouse, while pro-Daredevil civilians put on red masks and fight back.
Action director Philip J. Silvera had three days to prep each fight: three days for Daredevil, and three days for Kingpin. He adds, “Each one of them I shot in one day.”
In designing the fight he knew that Daredevil and Kingpin share a common bond. He says, “They each love New York so much, and they want the same thing from two different sides of the same coin. And that’s the juxtaposition of these two characters.”
Silvera, having worked on Season 1, is no stranger to the world of stunts and “Daredevil.” But no matter how big the fight sequences needed to be, storytelling remained of the utmost importance for Silvera, and any action needed to be driven by the characters’ emotions. “It’s never so much about the fact that we’re trying to outdo ourselves,” he says.
With Kingpin, the season begins with him being voted in by the people of New York City as mayor. But in the end, the city and the people have turned against him. Silvera explains that when Kingpin gets into an emotional moment, he loses all sense of calm. “This is the first time that everyone sees it,” he explains. Silvera says, Kingpin is seeing red. “From that first hit, you saw how lethal and powerful he was.” Kingpin walks out into the hallway and “takes out the biggest guy immediately after that, and you start to feel like you’re trapped.”
The courthouse riot scene intercuts with the anti-vigilante task force. Silvera also got the chance to work with Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones and Camila Rodriguez as White Tiger. “I had never gotten to work with her until the season, so she had now been part of a hallway scene with Matt, and then Camila, who plays White Tiger, she’s amazing. She is short but powerful in how she enters the scene.”
Despite the action, the storytelling remains front and center, reflecting each character’s way of handling the moment. “Matt and Jessica end up grabbing reporters in the way, and they’re trying to protect these bystanders, whilst trying to stop Fisk. And then you have Jessica Jones, whose powers are finally coming back with full strength. As the scene progresses, you see her regain her strength progressively more and more, and there are key things that we see her grab someone by the arm and pick him up, and we see Fisk doing that in a very human way, so you’ll get the juxtaposition of each one of their character traits and powers, but also the contradiction to the emotional moments they’re going through.”
Having worked with Cox and D’Onofrio since 2014, Silvera knows how far he can push them. However, this marked his first collboration with Ritter. “I shot a sequence with her earlier where we really got to know each other, and I understood how much she wanted to do and how involved she wanted to be.” He adds, “That being said, when we design the action, you can see them doing 90 to 95 percent of the action.”
And when things get too risky for the actors, stunt doubles step in. “We have great stunt doubles,” he says.
