While Netflix’s Daredevil is intended to be connected to Marvel’s massively successful cinematic universe, the series’ blind superhero isn’t quite like the gods and green giants which viewers have become accustomed to. In the new show’s second episode, series creator Drew Goddard and fight coordinator Philip Silvera treated fans to a bloody five-minute-long fight scene which they filmed in only one take, bringing a “grounded, real-world weight” to Charlie Cox’s central character Matt Murdock.
Early reviews of the Netflix superhero series which was released in its entirety last Friday have been extremely positive, with critics and fans alike expressing their approval for the dark and bloody fight scenes featured in the show. Most of the discussion has revolved around a hallway fight scene in Daredevil’s second episode, when Cox’s masked hero has to take down a group of Russian mobsters to rescue a child who was kidnapped by traffickers. Matt Murdock emerges from the fight more bloody and bruised than Captain America and Thor after the epic battle for New York at the end of Avengers, and Silvera recently told EW that he hopes this vulnerability will help viewers relate to Daredevil better than the other shining heroes of Marvel’s cinematic universe.
“Even though these are superhero characters, what I like to do—and this is just my personal approach—I like to find grounded, real-world weight to them,” said Silvera, who has worked on a number of other Marvel films and choreographed the opening battle in Thor: The Dark World. “This is just a guy with pure will and determination to do the right thing. He can take the punishment, and he keeps working through it, as much as he gets it. He’s a lot more vulnerable in that sense.”
Silvera was initially nervous about director Philip Abraham’s insistence that the epic fight scene take place in one take, but he, Cox, and his stunt team were able to rehearse and perfect the fight in only two days. Silvera equipped Daredevil with a unique fighting style that combines elements of Murdock’s father’s boxing style, the Filipino martial art Kali, and Wing Chun. Cox trained in that hybrid fighting style for many of the series’ hand-to-hand scenes, but his double Chris Brewster took care of the flips and used Daredevil’s frequent entrances and exits from rooms in the hallway during the five-minute scene to switch places with Cox.
