Fans know Daredevil: Born Again as the Disney+ series that brought Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock) and Vincent D'Onofrio (Wilson Fisk) back into the MCU fold, continuing the story Netflix's Daredevil started years earlier. What's less well known is how close Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/The Punisher) came to sitting the whole thing out.
A Character Bernthal Didn't Recognize
Bernthal's Frank Castle debuted in Daredevil Season Two before spinning off into his own Netflix series, The Punisher, which was canceled after two seasons of mixed reviews. When Marvel Studios announced Born Again in 2022 as an eighteen-episode continuation, Bernthal was brought back to reprise the role. But according to the actor, the writing didn't match the character he wanted to play.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bernthal put it bluntly: “I didn't like what they had for Frank at all.” Rather than quietly playing along, he stepped back from the project — a decision that only changed once things fell apart elsewhere on the show. The 2023 Writers' Strike halted production midway through the first season, and in the aftermath, original showrunners Chris Ord and Matt Corman exited. That shakeup gave Bernthal his opening. “Ultimately, they gave me something that they let me rework and rewrite — and they aired that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It worked for them.”
It's a pattern for the actor: he told the outlet that One Last Kill, the standalone Punisher special he co-wrote with director Reinaldo Marcus Green, took “five years of negotiating and navigating, of not doing a lighter version that maybe they wanted.” His condition was simple, he said: “I insisted that I had to be the creative force behind it.”
The Overhaul That Followed
Bernthal wasn't the only thing Marvel Studios rethought. With Dario Scardapane stepping in as showrunner and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead directing, the show's original eighteen-episode order was reworked into two tighter seasons — with a third now confirmed — and rebuilt around the tone that made the Netflix version so popular. Karen Page and Foggy Nelson returned to the cast after being cut from earlier drafts, and Ayelet Zurer was brought back as Vanessa Fisk after the studio reversed an earlier recast.
Even the directing lineup changed. Cox recently revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that Tom Hiddleston had been set to direct an episode in the original version, calling it “one of the great losses of the back half of that original season.”
Add it all up, and the Born Again that premiered in March 2025 looks almost nothing like what was first put into production — largely because Bernthal, among others, refused to settle for a version of the character that didn't work.
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