Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin is now the dark beating heart of Marvel’s TV shows

Marvel Studios released Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld’s Hawkeye in November 2021 as a little holiday treat for superhero fans, but the real joy was the way the show gradually teased the return of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk—with D’Onofrio reprising his role from Netflix’s Daredevil show, where he was one of the undeniable highlights. Though Hawkeye was much cheerier than Daredevil ever was, D’Onofrio hadn’t lost a step in his performance and was just as compelling in the Disney+ series as he was when he was trading punches with The Devil Of Hell’s Kitchen on Netflix (though it was seemingly left intentionally unclear if the events of Daredevil were meant to have happened before the events of Hawkeye, if at all).

A lot of things happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since then, both in the movies and on the Disney+ shows (including Charlie Cox’s Daredevil making his own return, both in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk), but it wasn’t until the new Echo series that D’Onofrio and Fisk came back. And now Marvel finally seems ready to make the Kingpin the twisted, angry center of its whole TV universe.

And that’s great, not just because the Kingpin is a great villain—with his unnervingly calm exterior that barely conceals an endlessly buzzing mountain of biblical rage—but because D’Onofrio is a great representative for Marvel and for the potential of superhero stories. He’s such a great actor that both his performance and his passion for the craft of acting elevate everything around him. Just look at D’Onofrio’s recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where he offered a thoughtful take on the Kingpin’s headspace post-Echo and elegantly teased his return in the troubled Daredevil: Born Again series.

Echo ended with Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez embracing her place in her Choctaw family and tapping into the same healing powers that her mother had used when she was a child, using them to seemingly heal the Kingpin both physically and mentally—by forcing him to confront painful childhood memories of his father. Screaming “What did you do?” a distraught Kingpin runs away and boards a plane back to New York (where he sees a news report about how someone Kingpin-like should run for mayor).

When asked about that ending, D’Onofrio (a true actor king) actually offered his own impression of what it meant, saying that he doesn’t think Fisk as “changed” so much as he’s been “enlightened.” About what, D’Onofrio doesn’t say, but he does tease that the news report about New York’s mayoral election gave him a realization that, if he wants to be “all-powerful,” then “this is what I’m going to do.”

He seems to be saying that this isn’t just Fisk coming up with his next evil scheme, but Fisk making a decision about the kind of man he wants to be—and the kind of man he’ll be in future MCU appearances like Daredevil: Born Again. Speaking of, that show has been going through a creative overhaul, with Marvel bosses reportedly unhappy with what original head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman had come up with, and the new version of Born Again will apparently be much more reminiscent of the Netflix show.

Marvel semi-officially declared that the Netflix superhero shows are canon in the MCU now, even though that doesn’t entirely make sense, but D’Onofrio told THR that making the connection explicit lets the show bring in “a lot of cool stories and all the collateral story that happened in those original three seasons.” That means Fisk, and his existing relationship with Daredevil from the Netflix show, will form the backbone of these shows going forward, and with D’Onofrio being the one going out in front of the public and hyping up this stuff, talking about how Born Again will now get to operate “with all of that history behind us and the outcome of all that history,” he’s doing more to generate excitement for the future of Marvel’s TV projects than Marvel itself—which couldn’t be bothered to explain if Netflix’s Daredevil happened in the same universe as Disney+’s Hawkeye for literal years.

Robert Downey Jr. recently told Rob Lowe on his Literally! podcast that he thought he did some of the best acting of his career as Tony Stark in the Marvel movies, but it “went a little bit unnoticed because of the genre.” He’s right on both counts, but everything about D’Onofrio’s work as Wilson Fisk is a clear illustration of just how right he is and, perhaps, an indication that the future of Marvel Studios’ TV branch is in good hands.