The latest season of Marvel’s Daredevil is due to start production tomorrow, and true to form, the makers of the show are giving absolutely nothing away about who Matt Murdock will be going up against third time around. Marvel and Netflix have a damn near spotless track record when it comes to keeping their villains under wraps, and viewers regularly face being caught unawares by the appearance of new or unexpected antagonists.
From Wilson Fisk’s unwelcome prison ambush of Frank Castle, to the sudden and brutal mid-season removals of both Cottonmouth and Alexandra Reid in favor of surprise replacements, the show-runners pride themselves in avoiding both predictability and cliche when it comes to their bad guys. Their success in this regard has only invited a higher level of speculation from internet commentators, who believe that the show’s casting calls may have already given away the identity of Season 3’s bad guy.
Back in August, it was widely reported that the Daredevil production team were actively searching for an actor to play an athletic but unstable FBI agent. This has largely been interpreted as being for the purposes of casting the character of Stan Carter, who would go on to become the murderous vigilante Sin-Eater. It’s an educated and well considered guess, though not the only plausible explanation.
In the original comics, the FBI and SHIELD provided a huge number of former agents who turned into notorious villains. From Carl Denti (X-Cutioner) and Joe Wade (Scarlet Spider), to the anonymous agent who adopted the identity of Taskmaster. It seems Marvel’s US law enforcement has a nasty habit of breeding the very criminals it was set up to contain.
There is even a delicious fan theory that this could well be Daredevil’s most iconic foe, Bullseye, in the making. In a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment from Season 1, one of the police snipers who opens fire on Murdock can clearly be seen to have a playing card attached to the outside of his kit. Some fans believe this was a placeholder, for the sniper to be unveiled as Bullseye at a future point.
It’s been revealed this week by THS that a number of additional FBI agent roles have now also been advertised for the show. These are all for middle aged male actors, details as follows:
[AGENT BEN JEFFREYS] 38-45, male, please submit Middle Eastern, South Asian, Israeli, Pakistani. A second-generation American, Ben is deeply committed to both his career and his family. He’s intelligent, warm and generous by nature but when pushed too far suffers a crisis of conscious. SERIES REGULAR.
[GORDON] 35 – 40, male, open ethnicity, FBI agent…POSSIBLE RECUR.
[HIGASHI] 35, male, Japanese, FBI agent…POSSIBLE RECUR.
The presence of additional FBI agents in the storyline, particularly some of them being recurring, make for some interesting plot possibilities. These could just be colleagues of the main villain, unaware of his fall from grace. On the flip side, this could mean that there are a greater number of corrupt federal agents en route to Hells Kitchen than we first thought.
The fact that the FBI have now been called into the show demonstrates how much of a pain in the ass Matt Murdock has become to the authorities. With the local PD in turmoil, the city has now turned to external help. But with Fisk’s influence growing ever stronger from inside his jail cell, there’s also the possibility that it is he who will create our new villain, much as he unleashed The Punisher on the city to keep attention from his activities.
The events of The Defenders (spoilers) may have left Murdock the worse for wear, but they also effectively signaled the end of The Hand, leaving a huge void that Netflix will need to fill across all four of its Marvel shows. So it’ll be interesting to see who they finally come up with to take on the Devil Of Hell’s Kitchen next year.
What do you think the casting call means? Be sure to speculate and tell us your thoughts in the comments!