‘Daredevil’ Star Ayelet Zurer Unpacks Vanessa’s Twisty ‘Born Again’ Season 1 Journey: ‘She Does It Out of Love’

Note: This story contains spoilers from “Daredevil: Born Again” Episode 9.

When “Daredevil: Born Again” started, you likely expected to see a new chapter in the fascinating relationship between the series’ “big bad” Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his art dealer-turned-criminal magnate wife, Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), but you probably didn’t expect Vanessa to emerge as one of the show’s most complex villains by the finale.

It’s been a twisty, unexpected journey for the character, who we first met as a kind and charming curator in the original Netflix series. But when we met her again in “Born Again,” she had become something of a criminal mastermind in her husband’s stead, leading their criminal enterprise to new heights while he was away and fostering resentment toward Wilson’s absence in the process. She’s gone from Queenpin to a sidelined political wife, took up a lover, went to marriage counseling, and by the end of the season, so much more — and so much darker.

It was an unexpected return to the character for Zurer, too, who originated Vanessa in the Netflix series and returned after the Disney+ series was re-tooled during the strikes.

“When I walked back into the role, my first instinct was to go to what I remembered from the role and how she was, but it was seven, eight years later, and just like Vanessa was saying in one of the episodes, she’s not the same person anymore,” Zurer told TheWrap. “People change. And to be honest, I’ve changed. My point of view changed. You know, life goes on. So, I struggled in the beginning to find my footing in the way that she was written. But very soon and quickly, I understood where this is going and why it’s needed.”

For Zurer, it wasn’t necessarily the darker turns to come, but Vanessa’s affair with an artist named Adam that emerged as one of the elements she struggled with the most.

“I always saw her as the most loyal-to-a-fault person, the most honest. That honesty is one of her traits, and so, in that setting, how is it possible for a person like that to have a lover? But then I actually leaned into the writing and the development of the character as written for “Daredevil: Born Again,” and I felt like it actually matches, in a certain way, my evolution as a person, my growth, my views as I spread my wings,” the actress explained.

“I think Vanessa is a grown-up woman who became very successful in what she does because she understands human behavior, what people want and how much they’re willing to pay for it,” she continued. “So, by sort of leaning back into the new writing, I found something very joyful to play. I found her to be really interesting, but also so strange in a way, and intriguing.”

But Vanessa’s affair is ultimately one of her more minor moral transgressions as the season progresses. For one thing, she ends up killing her former lover in a dark and brutal recommitment ceremony of sorts. When Wilson reveals he’s been keeping Adam captive the whole time they were in therapy and gives her a choice, she chooses their dark love, picks up a gun and shoots her former lover dead in his cell.

For Zurer, she had to connect the actions of Vanessa in “Born Again” to that of the character she created in the original series, and ultimately, Vanessa’s choice at that moment all came down to two things: love and honesty.

“I was looking for the connection between Vanessa that was and the Vanessa that is right now, and Vanessa that was, and Vanessa that is, are both into brutal honesty, because I feel like that’s their safe space. So, you know, from her perspective, she didn’t really have a love affair for the love, it served a purpose,” Zurer said.

When Wilson revealed his truth — that he was not this measured man who could forgive her affair and leave Adam be, that he’d indeed been tormenting her former lover the whole time, twisted though it may be, for Vanessa, that reaffirmed her love and commitment. As Zurer highlights, it’s a scene that mimics her character’s choice to accept Wilson for who he really is, darkness and all, in the first season of the original “Daredevil” series.

“He was always number one in her heart, and so when he reveals the truth to her, the truth is bigger than anything else. You know what I mean? I know it’s weird, but the fact that — same as she was at the beginning, where he was like, ‘Okay, this is who I am. This has been done to me. This is who I am,’ and she accepts his totality because of his honesty. So, this is a double-take of that. I mean, it’s, it’s a sort of, ‘Here I am’ again. ‘This is who I am. Will you accept me?’ And she accepts him,” Zurer said. “Because I think one of the reasons she’s done what she’s done is to hurt him, in a way. It’s a form of punishment as well. And a test. From her end, it’s if he offers brutal honesty, she offers in return entire 100% commitment.”

By the end of the season, we also learn that she was behind the heartbreaking death of Matt Murdock’s (Charlie Cox) best friend and legal partner, Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), who unwittingly uncovered her plans to create a nation-state where the Fisk criminal empire would be untouchable. To do so, she recruited Benjamin Pointdexter (Wilson Bethel) — a bold and daring choice considering the last time we saw him in “Daredevil” Season 3, he was doing everything in his power to kill her.

“I think she’s fearless. In a sense, she’s a mirror of Wilson in their fierceness, but she does it, I think … again, it’s crazy, but she does it out of love, which is what makes her character interesting,” Zurer said. “She’s not a villain, per se. She’s a woman committed in love, deeply in love. They’re kind of halves of each other, in a way.”

The actress added that her recruitment of Pointdexter is “like a sin” that she can’t get rid of. “This whole Pointdexter thing is like the first break in the structure she’s building in order to create safety for her and Wilson Fisk,” she said. “He’s the thing that she uses to create safety, and he’s the reason that everything starts breaking down.”

Indeed, after Matt confronts the Fisks at their gala, he winds up on the wrong side of Pointdexter’s scope, taking a bullet intended for Vanessa’s husband — Murdock’s nemesis, Wilson Fisk. And what’s her reaction in that moment? “I think guilt, in a sense,” Zurer said. “It’s the beginning of guilt, the beginning of what have I done?” In the immediate, it sets off a series of events that leads to martial law in NYC, but we’ll have to tune in to the next season to see what other consequences lie in store for Vanessa’s Lady Macbethian turn.

Fortunately, we won’t have to wait too long to see how that guilt plays out because filming for Season 2 is already underway. Unlike the patchwork of the revamped first season, Season 2 is entirely created by showrunner Dario Scardapane.

“I feel so much freer and I understand the nuances in the writing,” Zurer said of returning to the character for Season 2. “Because the nice thing about Dario is that he writes in a nuanced way, for her especially, I feel like. So there’s a lot of digging and interesting choices that you can take with anything he does because it gives an opportunity to make interesting choices. So in the second season, because it was fully him and his choices as a writer, I feel like there’s a sense of freedom for him as well, and for the people who portray the characters as well.”

While details on Season 2 are naturally being held under wraps, one thing we always know about Vanessa for sure is she’s going to fixate on the art of it all. And certainly, the way that Vanessa and Wilson stroll past their cages of captives at the end of “Born Again” Season 1 calls to mind the way they used to walk through her gallery together in the original series.

“It’s always about that, in a sense, because there’s something very interesting about her. That’s why she chose Adam and didn’t have a lover that was the men protecting her or somebody else, she chooses art always over anything else,” Zurer said. “I think that’s kind of the distortion in her perspective, that everything is beautiful and artsy. She could have been an amazing person. Like an angel, like an angel in white, like she begins in the story, but she also accepts the darkness and she sees it as equally fascinating. So, in a way, yes, art continues to be part of the whole thing all the way, even at the end.”

“Daredevil: Born Again” Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.

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