Jon Bernthal refused to be in the original version of Daredevil: Born Again

But at least they were willing to return at all, which is more than you can say about Jon Bernthal. Bernthal, whose version of Frank Castle featured in this week’s episode of the streaming show, revealed in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that he straight-up declined to come back when approached about the original version of Born Again. “Ultimately, I didn’t see it,” Bernthal said of the version of the character he was being asked to play for that softer, earlier take on the series. “I didn’t see the version of Frank, and what they wanted from Frank [didn’t] really make sense to me and I thought would not appeal to the fans and wouldn’t be congruent. It was not something I was really interested in doing. So we had to walk away.”

Bernthal sounds much happier with the new Born Again, saying that, “I feel like it’s opened the door to getting closer to the Frank Castle that I really, really want to portray.” He also credited Scardapane and other members of the show’s (second) staff with giving him more input on how the character appears, because, in case it wasn’t clear, Bernthal thinks about Frank Castle a lot. “They really brought me into the conversation,” he told EW. “We really got specific about where Frank is psychologically, where Frank’s at physically.”

It’s fairly clear, in hindsight, that Born Again‘s original version ran into an obvious paradox: It wanted to bring back the actors who were a huge part of the success of the Netflix series, without necessarily bringing back the characters they’d become deeply attached to. (At least, in the particularly gritty forms that made the original series so distinctive.) Cox and D’Onofrio were apparently willing to accept that—at least, up until whatever point got hit once the series was forced into downtime by the strikes. But Bernthal (who’s also writing his own standalone Punisher special for Disney+) is upfront about not letting his desire to play the the character again compromise what he sees as being core to Frank Castle: “You can’t get confused with how much you love something, how much you love playing something, how much you want to do something. You got to make sure you’re serving it. You got to make sure you’re doing justice to the people that believe in it and doing justice to the iterations that have come before you.”