Ten years ago, actor Charlie Cox put on a mask to play an acrobatic Marvel superhero in the three-season series “Daredevil,” based on the street vigilante committed to keeping New York City safe.
Now, viewers get to watch Cox reprise his breakout role in the two-episode premiere of the series “Daredevil: Born Again,” which aired Tuesday on Disney+.
The nine-episode “Born Again” debut season continues the story of Matt Murdock, a lawyer who was blinded as a child in a chemical accident. This tragedy gave him supernatural abilities, which he uses to fight crime under the alias of Daredevil.
“He has the unique ability to recognize when it’s being led in the wrong direction — I think he’ll do anything to protect the city and his community in particular from being led down that path,” Cox said in an interview with NBC News.
At the end of “Daredevil” season three, Daredevil had forced organized crime boss Wilson Fisk (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) back into prison.
“Born Again” will pit Daredevil against a much savvier Fisk — who fans commonly know as the Kingpin — who’s successfully reinvented himself as the top candidate in New York City’s mayoral election. It’s so much so that the slogan “Fisk can fix it” becomes widely popular.
While his character is notoriously feared as a villain, Fisk’s love of New York City is just as compelling as Daredevil’s, D’Onofrio explained.
“I would say that unfortunately for Daredevil, Fisk feels the same way, that he loves the city and he thinks he’s the one that’s going to fix it. And I think he means it,” D’Onofrio said in an interview. “What he’s not doing is completing his agenda in public. He’s not talking about what the rest of that agenda is. And that is to stretch his reach, control.”
Putting the mask back on?
In the first episode of “Born Again,” Murdock has given up crimefighting as Daredevil to support the police and the court system.
But with 3 out of 10 people leaving the police force and a traumatic event in the first episode, Murdock will have to consider putting the mask back on in a city where Fisk is wrongly criminalizing superhero vigilantes.
One of them is White Tiger, the groundbreaking Latino Marvel character played by the late actor Kamar de los Reyes, who died from cancer on Christmas Eve in 2023. De los Reyes plays Hector Ayala, who takes on the alias of White Tiger with an amulet that gives him superpowers.
“Kamar did such a beautiful job. There was so much humanity in his performance. He brought so much of his culture to the character, as well,” Cox said. “I really wish he had the chance to watch his performance in it because I think it’s going to be iconic.”
Fans will recognize the Puerto Rican actor as detective Antonio Vega from the long-running ABC soap opera “One Life to Live” as well as the voice and face of the memorable Call of Duty: Black Ops video game character Raul Menendez.
In “Born Again,” viewers will first see Hector Ayala/White Tiger walking down to a subway platform. After a confrontation with police, he gets accused of murder.
For Cox, White Tiger was also a story that he wanted to bring to the series.
“When I first got this role back in 2014 and I started reading Daredevil comics for the very first time, one of the storylines that I really responded to early on was the trial of the White Tiger,” Cox said. “It’s so fascinating to witness a character like Matt Murdock, a lawyer and also a superhero, defend another superhero.”
Bill Mantlo and George Pérez created White Tiger in 1975. Seeing the character half a century later on screen will give many Latino Marvel fans much overdue recognition, according to author and comic book scholar Frederick Luis Aldama.
“Why is White Tiger important? Because it shifted for Marvel the way Latino characters were brought to life,” Aldama said. “It was not stereotypical. It had complexity. And it naturalized the way we speak. It wasn’t from an outsider’s perspective or a stereotype of speaking Spanish.”
The possibility of who will carry on the legacy of the White Tiger after de los Reyes also has fans buzzing.
“We all know that Kamar, the actor who was playing Hector Ayala, unfortunately died. So maybe the mantle will be handed over to his niece like they did in the comic? Or to his youngest sister? We’ll see,” said Aldama, who was planning a “Daredevil: Born Again” watch party at the reception for BIPOC Pop, an annual comic book and arts expo in Austin, Texas, on Thursday.
