Charlie Cox faced a lot of challenges when he tackled the role of blind superhero Matt Murdock for Daredevil. He has had to alternate between a blind lawyer who pretends to require a cane and a vigilante who can use a radar sense to kick ass and take names. According to Cox, one of the most challenging things about playing Daredevil falls somewhere in the middle. Cox had this to say about one of the difficulties of Daredevil:
The hardest thing is not necessarily what I do with my eyes, but it's as you know, it's normally when I'm in a scene with someone like Rosario or Foggy or even Elodie, who knows about Matt, they know about his abilities. He would never have to kind-of pretend to find something on the table, in the way that he would in front of Karen because she doesn't know about his heightened senses. It's really tricky when we are filming; it often takes up a lot of time.
Part of what has allowed Matt to get away with his double life for as long as he has is his ability to hide his heightened senses from others, and Charlie Cox has nailed playing a not-entirely-blind man who could definitely pull off the charade. But it's no wonder he needs time to get shots right when Cox going from scenes where Matt is fake-acting blind in front of Karen to scenes with Foggy where Cox is pretending to not even need his eyes to see everything around him. It gets confusing when both sides of his personality aren't the most natural for people to adjust to.
Charlie Cox went on at the Daredevil panel at the recent Wizard World convention in Chicago to explain a couple of the trickiest tasks he's had to face as Matt. Evidently, pretending to suture wounds on camera without looking is no easy thing, and reaching for items behind him without peeking goes against every instinct. Luckily, the Daredevil crew has worked out ways to make Cox's job a bit easier for him. Cox told this story about an early episode:
In Episode 4 of Season 1, Claire throws the sweater at me from over there and I have to catch it without looking at it. Soon as Rosario picked it up, we had one of the AD's in the corner go "1,2, 3 now."
Matt's early scenes with Claire as she patched him up and discovered his abilities were as much about selling his powers to her as they were selling his powers to the audience. We had already seen him in action beating the stuffing out of criminals, and we had already seen him faking his inability to see at all. Something as simple as catching a sweater helped flesh out Matt's abilities, and it's nice to know that Charlie Cox had help from the crew in making the catch. We could have used that blooper reel of him taking a sweater to the face a dozen times, though.
Unfortunately, we won't get to see more of Charlie Cox as star of his own series for a while. Daredevil was renewed for a Season 3, but it has yet to receive a release date. Given that Netflix has three other Marvel projects in the works - Iron Fist, The Defenders, and The Punisher - through 2017, we may have to wait until 2018 for Season 3. Check out our breakdown of what we know so far about Daredevil Season 3 for a peek ahead, and don't forget to look at our fall TV premiere schedule.
