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The writer’s and actor’s strike of 2023 affected numerous movie and television series that were already in production. Some productions were either put on hiatus, were completely shelved, or never got off the ground. One of those, was Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again, whose principal photography already began when the strikes occurred. The strikes in New York City moved in front of local productions and Born Again was one of those famously halted because of the writers and actors on strike in front of the Hell’s Kitchen set.

On a recent episode of Variety’s Actors on Actors, where two actors having a casually converse about their careers, their craft and experiences, Charlie Cox and Joe Locke discuss their time working on Marvel television shows. Cox played Daredevil on the original Netflix Daredevil series and reprised the role again for Daredevil: Born Again. Locke played Wiccan in Agatha All Along. Locke asked Cox about the numerous changes that were done on Born Again.

“They came up with the idea that it was going to be more of a kind of a procedural type show,” Cox explained. “It was going to be 18 episodes and we shot six episodes. Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays Wilson Fisk, and I were I think, respectfully vocal about how unsure we were that it was tonally working, that was going in the right direction. And we’re trying to be good soldiers about it and trying to give it its best shot, but it didn’t feel like it was quite right. It felt like we were starting to alienate some of the elements that had made the show successful in the first place, which is probably not a good thing.” 

“And then, the (writer’s and actors’) strikes happened.”

“For us, that ended up being a massive blessing in disguise, despite it being obviously terrible for so many people and so much of the industry. For our show, it was a lucky break because it gave the producers time to watch those six episodes. 

It’s true. After those Marvel executives reviewed the footage, they fired Chris Ord and Matt Corman the original head writers for Born Again, before production resumed. Dario Scardapane, who served as the showrunner for Netflix’s The Punisher, was brought on board to steer it back to course. Rather than being billed as a series reboot, it quickly was reframed thematically as a fourth season of the original Daredevil series on Netflix, which had three seasons of story that audiences endeared themselves to.

“When we came back, it was completely revamped. They moved those six to the middle of a season, they cut the order to nine (episodes). They rewrote the pilot and two finale episodes, and they added scenes to kind of serialize the whole thing and take it back closer towards what we were before.”

“It felt like a revitalized version of the show,” Locke said.

“Yes.” Cox agreed.

For one, they had to resolve the issue that Matt Murdock’s law partners and best friends, Foggy (played by Elden Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), two major supporting characters on the Netflix series were not brought back. Neither appeared in the already shot episodes before the strikes. Since Born Again was no longer a reboot, the writers decided to explain Foggy and Karen’s absence.

So in the rewritten pilot for Born Again, Foggy is murdered by Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), on-screen as a random act of violence. Or was it? A year passes and Karen moves far away from Hell’s Kitchen to California, thus allowing Murdock to start anew.

By the end of Born Again, it is revealed that Foggy’s death the direct orders of Vanessa Fisk. It was a preventative measure by Vanessa Fisk to keep Foggy from winning a court case that would hurt Mayor Fisk’s redevelopment project Red Hook and its crime connections.

“How Dario and Sana Amanat, one of the producers who’s on the ground, how they took that material and Frankensteined it together, I’ll never know. It really was extraordinary how they did that. I was genuinely worried. 

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Fear not, we have the essentials when it comes to Marvel's Daredevil - especially with Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again. Check out:

• The key difference between Netflix's Daredevil and Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again, according to the showrunner
• The best Daredevil stories of all time
• What to watch before Daredevil: Born Again 
• Popverse Picks: Our favorite things for Marvel's Man Without Fear including Ann Nocenti comics, the Netflix series, and more
• How Vincent D'Onofrio reinvented Daredevil's Kingpin
• Marvel's Daredevil actors, ranked from Charlie Cox to Ben Affleck and even Rex Smith
• How Frank Miller accidentally killed a Daredevil cartoon (and Marvel killed a book to avoid pissing him off)
• That time we caught Daredevil actor Charlie Cox sneaking into New York Comic Con as Bluey