Daredevil: Born Again star Charlie Cox: 'I was convinced the journey had come to an end'

"Yeah, probably two years at least where I was convinced the journey had come to an end. The third season came out in 2018 and I didn't start shooting Spider-Man until 2021, so it's been an emotional rollercoaster. To be honest, I'm still kind of pinching myself: I can't believe it's happened, that here I am talking to you at the release of the new season, and that I'm a couple of weeks away from filming Season 2/Season 5, however you want to look at it! I had let go of it, I thought it was over, I was very grateful to have had the experience and also grateful to have ended on a high — then when I got a call in 2020 during Covid from [Marvel boss] Kevin Feige, asking if I was interested in coming back and doing some more stuff, I was elated. I felt like I still had a lot to offer the character, and I never really got a chance to properly say goodbye, as it were, so I was thrilled. I've loved every minute of it — at this point, it feels like gravy!"

"It was nice, but it was also quite nerve-racking — particularly She-Hulk, because that required a slightly different tone than I'm used to with this character. I felt it was valid because there are a lot of Daredevil comics where the tone is slightly more lighthearted and it is more geared towards a younger audience, but it wasn't something I'd really explored with the character, and I also felt like I didn't want him to be the butt of jokes for being overly serious, so it was important to me that he was going to embrace the tone, and find some humor and levity. It was fun, but it had been a couple of years and I was quite nervous, I didn't want to let anyone down!"

"Time has passed, and I think the sense is that Matt has found quite a good balance. There's been a period of time where the negotiation in his head surrounding who he is to his core has been quietened, and he's managing to operate as a lawyer and run the company with Karen and Foggy, and at times he suits up and goes out at night to cross the Ts and dot the Is, as it were! It's a nice jumping-off point — we didn't want to feel like we were too tied into recent history, so enough time has passed whereby we don't need to reference the end of season three, and of course, for those fans who have been very clued up on all the proceedings, they'll also know that in that time he's been chatting to Peter Parker, he's been in Los Angeles with She-Hulk, so there's other stuff happening."

"It's a complicated one! One of the things I feel quite strongly about is that this relationship between these two men is so fraught, there's so much kind of loathing and distrust, not just towards who they are, but what they do. I think it's really important that we should feel, as an audience, that they almost can't be in a room together, and if they are, the likelihood is that there's going to be fireworks. The analogy that we use often is an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object; we talk about the fact that when you bring them together, there is the promise of an explosion, and if you bring them together too often and that doesn't happen, we start to lose those stakes. So we very rarely are in a room together; we've had some scenes on walkie-talkies or over tannoys or telephones, but very few moments where we come together, and when we do, it often ends in bloodshed. So going into this season, Dario [Scardapane, the showrunner] thought it would be really fun to find a way to bring us together early on, in a way where we have learned in some capacity to trust the other's word. You've seen that in the trailer, it happens early on, and it's fun because it's very different from any of the scenes we've had in the past. Obviously, it's an homage to the De Niro/Pacino scene in Heat, but from there, promises are made that are very quickly broken, and the show begins to unfold."

"Yeah, big time, and I actually found it quite hard at first — I've discovered that my body is not what it was 10 years ago! Actually during the strikes, I had to go and have shoulder surgery because I just wasn't healing from some injury, so yes, it was tricky. But I love the physical aspect of this character so much, I love being involved in the stunts as much as possible, and I think it's really important for the show. I think it's important that it is me whenever it can be, and a lot was done to make sure we could make it work."

"I think so. I hope so. It's hard for me to say, despite having seen most of it — you get to the point where you can't see the wood for the trees, and particularly in our case where we had an initial idea and we shot six episodes, then there was a slight rethink and we kind of took a lot of that footage and reorganised it and turned it into a slightly different show, thematically and tonally, so it is hard for me to know, but my sense is that it is definitely as dark and gritty and kind of sinister at times as the old show was, which I think is a good thing. I think a lot of the fans were really hoping we wouldn't be dumbing it down at all, and stylistically it does feel, dare I say it, Marvel Studios-ified, which I think is really cool; it's got an element of it that just feels like this is a character that exists in this other world, with these other characters. It's a little bit slicker at times, and a little bit more stylistically nuanced. That's my sense, at least."

"I'm really excited about it; I've read quite a few of the scripts and I think they're some of the best scripts that I've actually read. Our showrunner Dario, who was kind of brought in to rethink season one, has been able to oversee this whole season, so it's nice to give him the opportunity to have the continuity of one full season at least, so I'm excited to see that. He's a really tremendous writer, and what he's written so far — obviously we haven't shot any of it yet, but I see a world where it takes us in a different direction again, and there's a tonal shift. It has the feeling of more of a suspenseful thriller than some of the stuff we've done in the past. More than anything, I'm just over the moon that we get to keep doing it!"