The original Daredevil series was lauded for its brutal violence. When your show’s earliest episodes involve a guy throwing his face into a spike or Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) slamming a man’s head off with a car door, that tends to stick with people long after it’s over. Daredevil: Born Again wasn’t as violent until its later episodes, and its recent finale took some steps toward recapturing that brutality.
Specifically, Fisk uses his bare hands to crush the head of police commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston), who’d mouthed off one too many times throughout the season. It was the most wild death in the sequel series to date, and one that came late into production. Speaking to BloodyDisgusting, episode co-director Aaron Moorhead revealed he and co-director Justin Benson were in the second round of filming before they learned that’s how Gallo would go out.
“There were some broad aims for where to go, but the beat didn’t exist yet, and there weren’t hints at it,” he said. Things came into focus during reshoots and extra photography for earlier episodes, and once they reached the finale, they saw the moment in the outline: “and we’re going to crush his head.”
At the time, neither director knew how that would happen, but they knew it should be a practical effect. While the SFX team for Daredevil: Born Again went about using 3D scanning to craft a mold of Gaston’s head, D’Onofrio took it upon himself to walk everyone through the how of the skull crushing. According to Benson, the actor got pretty jazzed about this kill, and even went so far as to use Moorhead to demonstrate how it’d be blocked. He also worked “very closely” with the directors and SFX team to get the skull crushing right.
“We usually see thumbs in the eyes, but I just thought it was important to match the blatant, raw brutality of the [original show’s] decapitation,” D’Onofrio told the outlet. “It was more just not having any empathy at all, and just finding the right position with his body to crush the head. It sounds gross when I talk about it, but I wanted it to be brutal and that the head collapses and tears, which is the surprise gore.”
The full BloodyDisgusting article goes into deeper specifics, including insight from the effects members into scanning Gaston and putting their own spin on the typical skull-crush deaths. But all the effort paid off: Moorhead recalled some crew visibly recoiling when they shot the scene in full, and it’s definitely going to stick around in people’s minds for a while.
Even Gaston called it one of his more interesting deaths across his acting career. “I’ve died 21 times on camera over the years, and this was the 20th. What happens to me is pretty shocking, and this is the most colorful and dynamic.”
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