Vincent D’Onfrio’s Kingpin turned him into one of the all-time great Marvel villains we’d ever seen in live-action by the end of Daredevil‘s first season, which is why fans are so desperate to see him return in any capacity. The MCU has largely rectified its villain problem, but you could still argue that we’ve yet to see Kevin Feige’s franchise present an antagonist as engrossing, complex, multi-faceted and ultimately terrifying all at once as Netflix’s Wilson Fisk.
It’s a hell of a performance across the show’s entire three-season run, and barely a week goes by without D’Onofrio being linked with a comeback. The audience wants it, and he definitely wants it, but the ball remains firmly in Marvel’s court, even if we’ve been hearing unsubstantiated tales surrounding his impending return that make Hawkeye‘s fifth episode one definitely worth keeping an eye on.
In a new interview with ScreenRant, though, D’Onofrio was modest when discussing the strength of his work on the Netflix smash hit. In fact, he heaped most of the praise and credit on the Daredevil writing team, who put the building blocks in place for him to deliver his best interpretation of the character on the page.
“It’s the writing first, and then it’s also who’s involved in it, who’s producing it, who’s directing it, what other actors are going to be involved in it. But first, it’s the writing. When you’re a young actor, you think it’s all about your performance and that’s what you focus on. But then you soon realize, as the years go by, that you have no performance unless the writing is great. And so you start to lean into knowing who the best writers are, knowing good writing, and knowing how to analyze a script.
And what’s a good script or what’s not a good script always comes back to the writing. For instance, with Wilson Fisk, there’s no performance of mine that I did that wasn’t written first. It was just great work by all the writers that did each season. They were all great in their own way. I never touched those scripts. I never altered dialogue; I never asked to alter dialogue. It was all there, all the time, and that’s rare. Especially in the first and third season, I would look forward to cracking open the script and reading it.”
The Kingpin chatter isn’t going to die down until either D’Onofrio shows up on our screens or somebody else is cast in the role, but you’d have to think Feige and his team will be fully aware of that. Hopefully it happens sooner rather than later, but the chances will increase exponentially should his arch-nemesis drop by Spider-Man: No Way Home as we’ve been led to believe.
