Capturing Fisk's Double-Sided Persona In Marvel's Daredevil Was Certainly A Challenge

Wilson Fisk very much ascribes to the "Speak softly and carry a big stick" philosophy. Except, the crime boss of Hell's Kitchen doesn't need a big stick — he's got himself. Whether on the pages of a comic book or the screen, the man they call Kingpin always towers over everyone around him. "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," once again demonstrating that animation is uniquely equipped for the superhero genre, exaggerates the proportion of Fisk's shoulders to his head to an absurd degree to literalize the idea of a man who dominates any room he enters. Meanwhile, the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan had little trouble physically embodying the character in the 2003 "Daredevil" movie, being a real-life Jack Reacher at six-foot-five and over 300 pounds.

Vincent D'Onofrio, on the other hand, had a trickier task, having to capture not just Fisk's daunting physical stature but also his vulnerable personality in Netflix's "Daredevil" series. It wasn't enough for viewers to believe he could decapitate a man with a car door for "ruining" his hot date; they also had to buy into the idea of Fisk being someone who would ruminate poetically about a white painting or take great care assembling an omelet for breakfast. The actor himself talked about the difficulty of convincingly capturing this duality during a Reddit AMA shortly before "Daredevil" premiered in 2015.

When asked what the "biggest challenge" was during filming, D'Onofrio replied:

"I think it was finding how to portray Fisk in an emotional way, as well as a menacing way. It was important to me to take [season 1 showrunner] Steven DeKnight's words off the page and perform them to include the humanity that he wrote them with. That was the biggest challenge throughout, to keep it sprinkled with the Marvel universe with a superhero feel, and at the same time ground it with emotional truth."