Charlie Cox, who plays Matt Murdock in Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again, has publicly disavowed one of Season 1’s most talked-about instalments, calling the fifth episode “really dumb” and revealing he tried to talk the production out of shooting it. Cox made the remarks this month while appearing at C2E2 in Chicago, where he explained why the episode — titled “With Interest” and built around a St. Patrick’s Day bank heist that finds Murdock operating without his costume — never sat right with him.
Speaking to fans, Cox said his objections were rooted in a plot inconsistency that, to him, undermined the episode’s logic. He described a sequence in which the robbers switch items between safety deposit boxes and later return with keys that should have given them access to the vault items they originally wanted. “If they already had both keys, why didn’t they just go to the vault and take the thing they originally wanted?” he asked, recounting how his query drew an uncomfortable silence from the creative team. Cox added he “really fought against doing it in a polite way” but ultimately watched the finished episode after it tested strongly with audiences during pre-release screenings.
The dissonance between Cox’s view and audience reaction highlights a broader production quirk of Born Again’s first season. The series underwent a substantial overhaul during principal photography, with numerous episodes adjusted in reshoots; by contrast, Cox said, “With Interest” was one of the few episodes left untouched. That isolation, he suggested, may help explain why it feels tonally and structurally different from the rest of the season, even as the series as a whole won praise from critics and viewers.
“With Interest” is also notable for a small but meaningful crossover beat: it features Yusuf Khan, the father of Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), in a cameo. The episode’s relatively self-contained caper earned high audience marks — “one of the highest tested episodes of Marvel Television,” Cox related — despite the actor’s reservations about its plotting and its throwback, game-like conceit that he’s previously described as feeling like a “‘70s game.”
Cox’s latest comments come as Born Again continues to expand on Disney+. Season 2 is currently on the 2026 TV schedule, releasing new episodes on Tuesday evenings, and production on Season 3 has already begun. Cox told fans at C2E2 that the creative team approached the follow-up season with greater cohesion from the outset, suggesting lessons from the first season’s uneven production were taken on board.
Even with his candid critique of a single episode, Cox remains the face of the series’ wider arc: Matt Murdock’s escalating conflict with Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, remains the central engine driving Born Again’s darker, more serialized storytelling. His public discomfort with “With Interest” underscores how behind-the-scenes choices — what gets reshot, what stays — can shape not only a single episode’s reception but an actor’s relationship to the material.