Charlie Cox Writes Foreword for “Daredevil” Comic Rerelease

“In the Spring of 2014, having just boarded a flight in London bound for NYC, I sat and contemplated the next few months of my life. There were many things at that moment that I did not know. Here are three of them:

• Ten years from now, I’ll still not have returned “home.”
• My life was about to change, profoundly and irrevocably.
• Anything about Matthew

The audition process had been long and grueling, and it had highlighted my almost total lack of knowledge about the wonderful universe of Marvel. I’d never actually read a comic book, and so great was my ignorance of the character that in my first audition I neglected to portray him as blind — thinking “Daredevil” was simply the noun used to describe a skydiver or mountaineer. Thankfully, however, the powers that be saw something in me… Personally, I wasn’t convinced!

Having won this role of a lifetime, 1 immediately asked my new bosses at Marvel for guidance in terms of research and was promptly given a Marvel Unlimited account that, as it suggests, gives you access to nearly the entire back catalog of Marvel Comics – fifty years of incredible Daredevil history, at my fingertips. With the login details came a short list of essential reading. Top of that list was Born Again.

Over the next few months – alongside fight training, muscle building, accent work, visual-impairment consultations and basic lawyer research – I made my way through countless Daredevil issues, hooked from the very beginning. I began with everything Frank Miller, then jumped back to the character’s inception with Stan Lee and Bill Everett. I am loathe to single any out – but along with Born Again and Man Without Fear, I loved Daredevil: Yellow, Guardian Devil, End of Days and, of course, the spellbinding run in the early 2000s from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev.

I could never claim to have been the sort of fan who picked up his first comic as soon as I was old enough to read, alas. But I fell in love with these books, and bringing Matt Murdock to life on-screen has been one of the greatest honors of my life. For me, Matthew’s enduring fascination has always been his divided self. He is a man of profound contradictions – and when written best, he is a model of rectitude whilst having a moral center that seems to exist in polar-opposite extremes. He is highly erratic – yet you cannot help but trust him even, I would argue, when he touches madness on occasion (never better depicted than in the first few issues of Born Again).

Matthew is a passionate lawyer who believes with every fiber of his being in the fundamental importance of the judicial system yet nightly takes the law into his own hands, doing away with due process. He is a devout Catholic who believes firmly in God’s will and the perfect unfolding of His plan – this conviction staying with him whilst he suits up in the colors of the Devil and “plays God” night after night after night. If I were to describe this person to you as if he were a friend of mine, you would rightly assume him to be a maniac. The least trustworthy of men. Perhaps suffering from some form of split personality and maybe in need of sedation and medication. And yet how miraculous is it that in the pages of these books, not only do we trust him, but we see him as a man of deep integrity!

By stripping Matt Murdock of everything in Born Again, we are given a glimpse into our hero reduced to his bare bones. Mirrored thousands of miles away by his greatest love, Karen Page, they literally struggle to take one step at a time. In these spine-tingling early pages, Mazzucchelli’s emaciated Matt is regularly found curled up in the fetal position juxtaposed with the towering, rounded Wilson Fisk. The image created in our minds is every bit as imposing as Miller’s depiction of the sinister strings that are pulled to unravel Matt’s life. This combination of the Visual Monster and the evil that cannot be seen is as chilling and claustrophobic as it gets!

As I said before, my life was changed forever when Matthew Murdock entered into it. One could argue that Matt Murdock himself was changed forever when Frank Miller entered into his life. And in Born Again, he highlights maybe my favorite aspect of Matt’s character: resilience! Upon writing this, I will shortly be entering into another long, hard stint of bringing this character to life on screen. There will be long hours; cold, harsh New York weather; brutal fight choreography; and emotional upheavals. What will I need to get through it all? Resilience!”