Daredevil actor Charlie Cox reveals that he had “never actually read a comic book” when he was cast as Matt Murdock

We’re just a few weeks out from the long-awaited return of Daredevil to our screens with Daredevil: Born Again landing on Disney Plus on March 4. To tie in with the new show, Marvel has today republished the original comic Born Again storyline in a Premier Collection trade paperback with an introduction by Matt Murdock actor Charlie Cox.

In his intro (revealed in full by Collider) Cox admits to having had an “almost total lack of knowledge about the wonderful universe of Marvel” before he was cast in the role, stating “I’d never actually read a comic book, and so great was my ignorance of the character that in my first audition I neglected to portray him as blind – thinking ‘Daredevil’ was simply the noun used to describe a skydiver or mountaineer.” That changed, however, when he was granted a Marvel Unlimited subscription and a reading list of titles to help him get up to speed before filming the first series of the Netflix show.

Cox went on to list some of the comics he’d read while in training for the original Netflix series. “I made my way through countless Daredevil issues, hooked from the very beginning. I began with everything Frank Miller, then jumped back to the character’s inception with Stan Lee and Bill Everett. I am loathe to single any out – but along with Born Again and Man Without Fear, I loved Daredevil: Yellow, Guardian Devil, End of Days and, of course, the spellbinding run in the early 2000s from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev.”