Who Is Heather Glenn, Matt's Girlfriend in Daredevil: Born Again?

[Warning: This article contains Daredevil: Born Again spoilers.] Sure, She-Hulk smashed Daredevil, but Matt Murdock’s (Charlie Cox) new love interest might make Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) green with envy. After making the jump to the big screen in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home as Peter Parker’s really good lawyer, Cox returned to the small screen in 2022’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. The Disney+ comedy series saw the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen travel to the City of Angels, first to defend his LA fashion designer client in court — and then leaping into action to defend him from Jen’s revenge-seeking, frog-themed client.

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After some playful banter (and ribbing over Daredevil’s new ketchup and mustard-colored costume), the superhero lawyers hit it off, and Matt’s business trip turned into a tryst with the Hulk’s cousin. That series ended with Matt joining Jen’s family for lunch, which turned into a sort of family reunion when Bruce Banner’s smart Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) returned to Earth with his son Skaar (Wil Deusner) after a season-long trip to the planet Sakaar.

Because She-Hulk: Attorney at Law‘s lighter and comedic tone clashes with the darker and more grounded Daredevil: Born Again, showrunner Dario Scardapane explained that the new series is effectively ignoring what seemed to be a blossoming relationship.

“I have plenty of leeway up until I hit the larger-scale plan for the MCU. So I try to ignore some stuff [from the wider universe],” Scardapane told SFX Magazine. “We establish a very specific Daredevil, both in terms of his dilemma, down to the suit and where we’re picking him up in his life. You can say that Daredevil is canon in the MCU, those other events [in Spider-Man and She-Hulk] happened, but some of them we are not leaning into. His one-night stand with She-Hulk may be one of those things.”

Matt has had many women in his life — Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), and Elektra (Èlodie Yung) among them — and in Born Again, Matt’s new love interest is Dr. Heather Glenn (played by The Deuce‘s Margarita Levieva), one of his longer-running romances from the comics.

Heather debuted in 1975’s Daredevil #126 by writer Marv Wolfman and artist William Robert Brown. Heather’s industrialist father, Maxwell Glenn, funded Matt’s The Storefront Legal Services, a clinic offering free legal advice at a time when his partner, Foggy Nelson, lost re-election as District Attorney.

Around the same time that Daredevil first found himself in the crosshairs of the master marksman Bullseye (in Daredevil #131), Murdock and Nelson, attorneys at law, learned that Heather’s father owned a slum tenement through his Glenn Industries. When it was discovered by Daredevil that Heather’s slumlord father hired Bullseye as a hitman, issue #147 revealed that Maxwell was under the mind control of Zebediah Killgrave, the Purple Man.

In issues #148-149, Heather quit the Storefront and ended her relationship with Matt, unaware of his double life: Matt had become distant because his alter-ego was hunting the Purple Man to prove her father was framed. A guilt-ridden Maxwell died by suicide in prison, news that Matt learned just before Heather walked in on the unmasked Daredevil (in Daredevil #151).

Heather blamed Matt and Daredevil for her father’s death, and Matt’s girlfriend exited his life just before his former flame and partner — the Black Widow — returned (in Daredevil #155). After Daredevil rescued Heather from supervillains like the Purple Man and Doctor Octopus, she resumed her relationship with Matt and became the new president of Glenn Industries. Although she eventually accepted Matt’s proposal to marry him (in Daredevil #186), their troubled relationship was further complicated by the resurrection and return of Matt’s old lover: the assassin Elektra.

Six weeks after Heather and Matt’s relationship ended, an intoxicated Heather revealed Daredevil’s identity to Tarkington Brown in 1983’s Daredevil #195 (an issue appropriately titled “Betrayal”). Brown used that information to put a hit out on Matt, and he would have killed Heather if she hadn’t been saved by Daredevil.

Here’s the twist: Heather wasn’t part of the Born Again storyline by writer Frank Miller and artist David Mazzucchelli spanning Daredevil issues #227-231. After a long absence from the Denny O’Neil-penned Daredevil comic run with art by Mazzucchelli, a drunk Heather summoned Matt to her apartment to confess she “couldn’t get rid of the loneliness.”

Heather had threatened suicide, and Matt was left guilt-ridden when his troubled former lover went through with the act in Daredevil #220. The tragic issue ended with a quote from Plato’s The Apology of Socrates: “Now it is time we were going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.”

New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiere Tuesdays on Disney+.