Vanessa Dies from Daredevil: Interview with Ayelet Zurer
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 5 of “Daredevil: Born Again,” now streaming on Disney+.
The lynchpin that holds Wilson Fisk’s sanity together is dead.
The fifth episode of ‘Daredevil: Born Again,’ aptly titled ‘The Grand Design,’ culminates in an inevitable disaster that’s been dangling over the heads of Marvel fans for a decade – one that puts Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) on a collision course of destruction.
So far in the Disney+ revival, Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) has maintained a clean public image – first as a mayoral candidate and now as the elected mayor of New York – by methodically concealing his nefarious activities and keeping his head in the dark. In the final series of episodes, his wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), plays a much larger role in his underground business dealings.
Unlike her comic book counterpart, who repeatedly pressured Wilson to abandon his criminal empire, Zurer’s portrayal of Vanessa is complicit – and downright integral – to Kingpin’s operations. In the original “Daredevil” series, Vanessa shows a fierce loyalty to Wilson and marries him even after his imprisonment on Rikers Island forces her into a two-year exile abroad.
And “Born Again” further cements Vanessa as the voice of reason in Wilson’s life, helping him exercise restraint. This dynamic is noticed by New York Governor Marge McCaffrey (Lili Taylor), who makes an appointment with Vanessa to confirm that she can temper her husband’s dark impulses. “I couldn’t sleep at night supporting Mayor Fisk,” she tells a stony-faced Vanessa in Episode 4. “But I can support Mayor and Mrs. Fisk.”
The mid-season finale ends on a cliffhanger in which Fisk’s public boxing match goes wrong, leaving Vanessa hit in the head by a flying shard of glass and bleeding in the arena. The fifth episode features a series of flashback sequences that explore the day Wilson and Vanessa first met at her art gallery, emphasizing her value in his life from the very beginning. The episode ends with Vanessa dying in her hospital bed, sending Wilson into a fit of uncontrollable rage that ends with him strangling a man.
“Personally, it was just a heartbreaking experience saying goodbye to everything we’ve been working on for the past 10 years,” Zurer said. Variety at the New York premiere of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ in March. “It was emotional.”
Vanessa is the second major character death from the original “Daredevil” series to take place in “Born Again,” following the shocking series opener in which Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is murdered by Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). Zurer says the decision came as a surprise and the creative team felt compelled to explain it personally.
“Everyone on the team had to call me directly to explain why – and how,” Zurer said. “They were often so emotional about it. But I really felt like it was also important to the story. An explosion that sends Vincent’s character, Kingpin, to a whole new level of crazy.”
Zurer’s hint about Kingpin’s escalation is consistent with Marvel canon. In Brian Michael Bendis’ early 2000s “Daredevil” series, Vanessa’s death leads to a calculated war of manipulation, with Fisk further embodying the moniker Kingpin, as if the last vestiges of his humanity died along with her. A more famous example can be found in 2018’s ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’, where a grief-stricken Kingpin risks destroying the multiverse to bring his family back to life.
“Power has always been a risky business,” Zurer explains. “It has always been an emotional quest [Kingpin] to have more power and to have more control. To fill something inside him. It’s more of a psychological aspect.”
She concludes, “She will never be enough. Nothing will be enough.”
