There’s one thing everyone who chooses to play a fan-favorite character in television or movies knows: you absolutely cannot please everyone and there are always going to be people criticizing you who don’t do their research. This is decidedly the situation that Vincent D’Onofrio has found himself in while playing Marvel’s Kingpin, with his new appearance on the Disney Plus series Hawkeye, and previous time with the character on the Netflix series Daredevil.
If it wasn’t proof enough to see Charlie Cox play Matt Murdock in Spider-Man: No Way Home, D’Onofrio’s appearance in the final two Hawkeye episodes shouldn’t leave any question as to what version of the Kingpin this is. As he told Screen Rant,
“They don’t exist separately. They’re the same person. I think from my point of view, like a lot of the Avengers stuff, a lot of the MCU stuff, they tried to connect as many dots to the original canon as they can, and some dots are just not possible to connect. And that’s what we’ve done with connecting to Daredevil and vice versa.”
But, of course, some fans took issue with his portrayal in the new series, claiming his strength was considerably enhanced compared to his character’s appearances on Daredevil. D’Onofrio responded in a ComicBook Nation podcast interview,
“You know I learned recently, a couple of the fans, they were very excited about it, they were commenting about the strength that I have. Because I’m throwing Kate around and stuff. But, I totally forgot. I just saw a clip on Twitter of me and Charlie fighting in DeKnight’s first season. Obviously, he’s an incredible director. He helped develop the character of Wilson Fisk. There’s a scene that we shot on an alley, in a street in Brooklyn, where I’m literally throwing Daredevil through the air. Like, I’m picking him up and swinging him 15 feet into a garbage can. I do it a few times in that fight. It’s no different, it’s really not. So, I keep saying that it’s the same Fisk that was in Daredevil. It’s the same canon, but people get confused about things. I understand.”
He also acknowledged that what we see of his strength and invulnerability is a bit more pronounced on Hawkeye to Rotten Tomatoes:
“I think that he is definitely physically stronger and he takes more physical abuse. And I think that’s exciting because that’s more like the canon of the comics. But I also think that he’s the same guy that was in Daredevil and that his emotional life is the same. Because the way that I executed the character is the same way I executed it in Daredevil, which is that everything is based on his childhood.”
But as far as social media goes, D’Onofrio has learned his lesson. In his ComicBook Nation interview, he talked about dealing with the worst parts of the internet:
“I used to have trolls, I used to have trolls. I did. But what I did was, I just stopped. I put them in a box where they don’t exist and I ignored them for a long period of time. They’ve just kind of gone away. Every once in a while, one will show up, and I just ignore it. Because I think that there’s too much going on in the world to perpetuate negative stuff. I used to get combative, and it was hurting nobody but myself.”
You can watch all of Hawkeye now on Disney Plus.