Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 Features A Major Connection To Marvel's Thunderbolts Movie

Spoilers for "Daredevil: Born Again" season 2 episode 1 follow.

Matthew Lillard joins the cast of "Daredevil: Born Again" this season, but Marvel fans hoping he'd be someone from the comics are going to be disappointed. No, Lillard plays "Mr. Charles" (definitely not the character's real name), a CIA agent overseeing a deal between the agency and New York City Mayor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio).

"Born Again" season 1 had one of the darkest endings in Marvel Cinematic Universe history, when Fisk declared martial law in NYC. Matt (Charlie Cox) and Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) also discovered the real reason Fisk was working to revitalize Brooklyn's Red Hook port. Under a 19th century charter, the port is a "free port" (meaning goods can come in without customs approval), making it perfect for smuggling.

But come season 2, it turns out the New York state government isn't too happy about Fisk's actions, especially when a cargo ship capsizes on its way to Red Hook (the crew scuttled it to keep Daredevil from finding the weapons onboard). The New York lieutenant governor and attorney general show up in Fisk's office, attempting to enforce some oversight. But then Mr. Charles walks in — after one phone call, the AG is defanged. Who was on the other line? "Miss de Fontaine."

Marvel fans will recognize that that name as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the corrupt director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and arguably the main villain of "Thunderbolts*." Val, an anti-Nick Fury, has been recruiting superhumans as assassins but as CIA director, she's still overseeing more mundane black ops like weapons smuggling too.

Matt and Karen assume the guns are for Fisk's armed police, but Mr. Charles and Val's involvement suggests the guns are actually meant for the CIA.

Val de Fontaine using Fisk's free port to procure weapons suggest the guns are meant for an illegal or unauthorized CIA operation. The real CIA has a long history of arming preferred factions in other nations. See the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal, where it was found the CIA had (without congressional approval but the backing of the Reagan administration) sold missiles to Iran to fund the right-wing Contra guerillas in Nicaragua.

Sticking to only the Marvel Cinematic Universe setting, Val indicated back in 2022's "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" that she wants to topple the Wakandan government; she sees their exclusive access to Vibranium as a threat to the United States' global superpower status. "Thunderbolts*" also revealed she funded illegal experiments to create a superhero as powerful as each Avenger and under her control: the result was the Sentry (Lewis Pullman).

During "Thunderbolts*", the walls were closing in on Val and she was under congressional investigation. She tried to set up all of her recruited assassins — Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) — to kill each other and dispose of the living evidence each one was. That only brought them together (well, except Taskmaster) as the Thunderbolts, who Val then spun to the public as the New Avengers to save herself.

Val isn't showing up in "Daredevil: Born Again" because she presumably has bigger fish to fry, so Mr. Charles is there to act in her stead. But this cameo-by-phone connects "Daredevil: Born Again" to the current MCU status quo without needing to bring in Julia Louis-Dreyfus herself.

"Daredevil: Born Again" is streaming on Disney+.