DAREDEVIL’s Kingpin Spills Everything He Knows

Vincent D’Onofrio sat down with the folks at screencrush to talk about Dardevil and how incredibly upbeat he is about this project.  Below you’ll find what I found to be some of the more interesting back and forths. All 13 episodes of Daredevil will be available from Netflix in May of 2015.

Screen Crush; Now you’re branching off into two major franchises, one of them – we talked about it a little bit – is ‘Daredevil.’ (the other is Jurassic Park)How has this transition for you been, especially with ‘Daredevil,’ which has such a diehard fanbase, and sometimes even fundamentally so?

Vincent D’Onofrio; Yeah, it’s huge. It’s huge. I mean the whole Marvel world is so huge. But I gotta tell you, I couldn’t be working for nicer people. I really am. I’m just having a great time. The whole — the way that we’re shooting it, our Daredevil, everybody that’s in the show, is just going so well. Tonight we have a big fight scene that’s happening. It’s the first time you see my character do something physical.

Screen Crush; Everybody I talk to who has been involved in a Marvel project describes [the experience] almost as their childhood fantasy come to life.

Vincent D’Onofrio; Yeah. I mean, it’s kinda cool. The thing about Marvel is that they’re not – they’re into real acting. They’re looking for artists that are willing to take chances and are willing to create characters, even if that character has been around for years and years in comic books, they still are depending on us to create something and take it somewhere else.

Robert Downey [Jr.] is the perfect example of that. Who knew that Iron Man was going to be who Robert made him?

Screen Crush; With such an iconic villain, though, as the Kingpin, there are a lot of fans out there with their ideas of what this man is. For you, what is that character and what do you want to bring, or what are you most excited to bring out in this character?

Vincent D’Onofrio;[Brief silence] I’m not gonna tell you.

I think – it’s not just me, by the way, it’s the writer. It’s Steven DeKnight, it’s Jeph Loeb at Marvel, it’s the scripts, and it’s me. I think it’s gonna be the … I hope — I should say – I hope it’s gonna be the new way to look at Wilson Fisk. I think that there will be no other Wilson Fisk but this one after we’re all done with it. That’s what we’re hoping for.

Screen Crush; Does fan reaction, or fan interaction or projections, get to your head at all?

Vincent D’Onofrio; No, I love it. It’s like when you’re doing a play and you feel the audience before you walk out for your first cue, you know? That feeling is quite something. When you do a play, you do so many performances. You show up in the dressing room after your 100th performance and you’re like, “I don’t wanna do this play anymore. I just don’t wanna play it anymore.” And you’re about to break into tears because you just don’t wanna do this fucking play anymore, you know? And in dressing rooms in theaters, you have these little speaker boxes, and you can hear the audience coming in. Once the audience starts coming in, hearing them, you suddenly go from hating the play to wanting to go out again, just by hearing the audience. And so it’s the same kind of thing. I can hear the audience with these fans of ‘Daredevil’ and these fans of Marvel, and it just makes you enthusiastic.