'Daredevil' Season 2 Somehow Plans To Top That Hallway Fight From Season 1
There are many things we can say about the first season of Marvel and Netflix's Daredevil series – Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio are great! Foggy sucks! It sags in the middle episodes! It's really good overall! – but one element stands out above everything else: the action is fantastic. Considering that many modern television shows still half-ass their action scenes with dull coverage cut together in a rapid-fire style, Daredevil was a breath of fresh air. Every fight scene was beautifully shot. Every punch looked like it hurt.
With the second season of the show arriving in a little over a month, news about what we can expect has switched from a slow trickle to geyser mode. Naturally, some of the new chatter revolves around the action scenes, including a sequence that sounds like a direct attempt to top the incredible hallway scene from season one.
Speaking with IGN at the TCA press tour, series star Charlie Cox chatted about the action in the new batch of episodes, describing one sequence as the hallway fight "on crack." Here's the quote:
"In terms of this season, there are a number of really good fights. There is one in particular that I'm really excited about because it's kind of like an homage to that scene, but it's almost like that scene on crack."
If you watched season one, you know exactly which scene Cox is talking about. During the climax of the second episode, Cox's Matt Murdock, already beaten and bruised and bloody, journeys into the heart of a child trafficking operation and the kicks the shit out of everyone there...in one lengthy, unbroken shot that original showrunner Steven S. DeKnight claims was filmed without any digital trickery.
So how do you top that, exactly? Cox doesn't specify, so we're left to our imaginations for the time being. However, Cox did delve into what made the original brawl so special, complimenting his stunt double and praising the harsh realism of the scene:
"Because it was shot in one [take], when we were shooting it — and my stunt double [Chris Brewster] did much more of it than I did – ... everyone was so tired. There was periods of time in the fight there were moments when he was leaning against the wall. That's something people forget to do when they edit a fight scene. That's what made it so real for me. If you get in a fight, that's what it's like."
And while we're on the subject of action sequences, Jon Bernthal, who is playing vengeful vigilante Frank Castle/The Punisher this season, spoke about how these new episodes will feature a greater variety of ass-kicking than previously seen:
"I think once you introduce a character like Frank Castle, once you introduce a character like Elektra, the stakes are raised a little bit in terms of the fighting. All of the sudden you're talking about weapons. Different questions are being brought up. I think what is the genius of Phil Silvera, the fight coordinator and stunt coordinator who choreographs these fights, is the fights are all character-driven and the fights tell a story. It's not just to look pretty or to look cool."
Bernthal's right about that much. A gun-toting bruiser like Castle isn't going to fight like the hyper-sensitive Daredevil, who isn't going to fight like Elodie Yung's Elektra, a highly trained ninja assassin. If you put those three in a scene together, you could get something truly wild.
The second season of Daredevil will drop on Netflix on March 18, 2016.