Wilson Bethel goes behind Bullseye’s “Daredevil: Born Again” diner fight: ‘We just went absolutely crazy’ (exclusive)

Key Points

• Wilson Bethel breaks down the epic Bullseye diner fight scene on Daredevil: Born Again season 2.

• The actor digs into Bullseye’s bigger role this time around and shooting the diner brawl in one day.

• “It was something like 80 different setups, and we just went absolutely crazy,” he says.

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Daredevil: Born Again season 2, episode 4, “Gloves Off.”

Wilson Bethel is visibly vibrating with excitement when talking about his role as Benjamin Leonard Poindexter, a.k.a. Dex, a.k.a. Bullseye, in the second season of Daredevil: Born Again. It’s because he didn’t have that much to do back in season 1. In Marvel’s defense, he came in as a later addition after a few episodes had already been shot and a creative overhaul ensued to Frankenstein-stitch together the full nine episodes.

Now, the man who never misses is back in a much bigger way.

“I knew pretty much from the outset of shooting season 2 that I was gonna have a lot more to do,” Bethel tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom in March. “Obviously, you never know what that means. Dario [Scardapane, showrunner] sketched out a few things for me, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the diner scene, nothing could’ve prepared me for some of the great work I got to do with Charlie [Cox] in the church.”

The season 2 premiere ended on a brief tease of Bullseye’s return: a throwing knife scrawled with the message “You’re Welcome.” However, episode 4, titled “Gloves Off,” is Bullseye’s episode. It begins with one of the most riveting action set pieces on the new era of Daredevil yet. Police swarm Dex inside a diner as he calmly sips from his milkshake. In the ensuing cacophony, Bullseye matches his skills at weaponizing silverware against his assailant’s gunfire.

Before Bethel got his hands on the season 2 scripts, Scardapane gave the actor his pitch for Bullseye. “Dex has a guiding principle,” Bethel recalls of that pitch. “He sort of has his north star back, that he had in the past with Julie and with his therapist, and that gives him a sense of purpose and a little bit of a sense of lightness.”

It felt, to Bethel, more in line with the spirit of Bullseye in season 3 of Netflix’s Daredevil when you see Dex “enjoying being a lethal motherf—er and a total apex predator.”

“That’s what we get to see in Born Again season 2 for the whole season,” he adds. “Dex has this guiding principle, he feels good about it, doesn’t matter that the rest of the world doesn’t see it remotely his way. So it means that he’s got this pep in his step, and when he’s murdering 100 people in a room, he couldn’t feel better about it.”

On the page, the diner scene is but a blip, “the roughest sketch” for the stunt team to them expand upon, Bethel says. He remembers his line in the script, “No, I’m one of the good guys,” which was all he needed to know this sequence was going to be something special. “That’s the whole beauty of this f—ing character,” Bethal exclaims. “This whole season is him thinking he’s one of the good guys” — even as Bullseye kills 50 or so task force agents with forks.

And unlike Cox, whose masked vigilante is often doing the kinds of acrobatics designated for a stunt double on set, Bethel performs most of his own action. As he puts it, “A lot of what I do is just throwing s— in cool ways. And I work on that a lot. It’s something I talk to the stunt team a lot about, figuring out how to embody this dude with as much murderous swagger as possible.”

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the diner sequence is that the team, led by second unit and action director Phil Silvera, shot it all in a single day, according to the star. While it would likely take a million dollar-budgeted studio movie to shoot that much coverage over the course of a week, Daredevil: Born Again did it with just a splinter unit, while main production unit was off filming other material.

“It was something like 80 different setups, and we just went absolutely crazy,” Bethel recalls. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of that I’ve ever done. I just think it’s an amazing feat.”

It required an enormous prep period. The stunt team, based off what’s in the script, create pre-viz; they stage a physical space and record a choreographed sequence depicting what the moves will look like. From there, they finesse the beats with the actors. By the time shoot day rolls around, everyone knows the exact list of shots they need.

This team also found additional moments on the day. Bethel remembers “luxuriating” in Bullseye’s calm before the storm of forks at the counter. One of the final shots of the scene is another example.

The camera pans down to the lobster crawling on the floor and the falling ketchup bottle, and then back up to show the aftermath. A city bus rolls along the street outside the window with a sign that reads, “I Love New York.”

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“God wanted this shot to exist,” Bethel says of that moment. “People will see that, they’ll think it was CGI. Nope, dude. That f—ing bus pulled up at the exact right moment with a billboard on the side that said, ‘I Love New York’ as f—ing Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’ is wrapping up. I mean, it’s too much.”

The episode of Daredevil: Born Again with the diner fight is available to stream now on Disney+.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly