Daredevil Star Speaks Out on Confusing Born Again Recasting

“You don’t need sight to appreciate art, but you do need honesty,” art dealer Vanessa Marianna (Ayelet Zurer) told blind lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) during their first meeting in Marvel’s Daredevil. Now Zurer — who returns as Vanessa Fisk, First Lady of New York who took the reins of Mayor Wilson Fisk’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) crime empire in her husband’s absence — is dealing out her own honesty about the role initially being recast in Marvel Studios’ Daredevil: Born Again.

“I love working with Vincent, and I was so thrilled to go back to it. I love the way he makes his character work, I love him as an actor, as a friend,” Zurer told TVLine about reprising her role alongside D’Onofrio. “He was one of the first people who called me when this was revealed; I think he was also very happy that it happened. It just feels right, you know?”

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Sandrine Holt (House of Cards, Homeland, Mayor of Kingstown) had replaced Zurer as Vanessa in the version of Born Again that was developed by original showrunners and co-creators Chris Ord and Matt Corman. (Not only had Ord and Corman recast Vanessa, but their version also wrote off Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page and killed off Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson off-screen.)

But when Marvel Studios released Ord and Corman and brought on Dario Scardapane (The Punisher) as showrunner as part of the show’s creative overhaul in late 2023, Zurer was invited back to reprise the role she originated in Daredevil‘s first season in 2015.

“I never really quite understood why they made that decision to not keep not just me but more almost all the actors but Vincent and Charlie,” Zurer said. “But I can say that when they did change the creative and decided to go back to the original cast, I was very, very happy to join. Because I really like that character, and I thought there was so much more to explore with her.”

Some of that territory is being explored in an unexpected way: couples’ counseling with Murdock’s girlfriend, Dr. Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva). Heather’s high-profile clients told her how Fisk suddenly “disappeared,” leaving her to take control of their business as head of New York’s Five Families.

“I was assaulted by a vigilante. The recovery process, it was quite involved,” Fisk said of the events of Hawkeye and Echo. “I couldn’t stay in touch with Vanessa. I couldn’t stay in communication with her. It was for the best.”

Although Fisk’s love for his wife was the one thing that Murdock could leverage over the former Kingpin — who once threatened to expose Daredevil’s secret identity and the lives of Matt Murdock’s friends — Born Again finds their relationship strained. As Vanessa confessed to Dr. Glenn, she was lonely. She missed her husband. Then he returned, and she doesn’t know how to feel about it.

“Why are we here? Because it feels like we don’t have a choice,” Vanessa told Dr. Glenn. For Fisk, he answered: “I’m here because I don’t want to lose my wife.”

Zurer told TVLine she was “very excited” to read the reworked script penned by Scardapane, “but I was at first taken aback by the shift had happened within Vanessa… and also some other things in the show that will be revealed later.”

“I was like, ‘How is that going to work?’ But once we dove in, I found Vanessa to be a way deeper character, because she is dealing with some new aspects of their relationship — trust, and honesty — that it made it very interesting for me to find ways to perform it,” she added.

New episodes of Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again air Tuesday nights on Disney+.