Author: Bilal Mian

April 10, 2015 7:00pm PT by Bilal Mian

 Ben Mark Holzberg/Syfy

“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, but there is still hope,” Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett tell THR.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the season one finale of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys.]

The journey to save the world using time travel was hijacked during Friday’s freshman season finale of 12 Monkeys.

“Arms of Mine” saw Deacon (Todd Stashwick) and 12 hooded members of the Army of the 12 Monkeys sieging control of the Temporal Facility in 2043 to use for their own purposes. Jones (Barbara Sukowa), who has stopped believing that the past can be changed because of all the failures they’ve encountered, offers the facility without much of a fight.

While Jones’ belief in changing the past to save humanity has been shaken, new showrunner Terry Matalas says the character “is about to be proven wrong.”

“Jones above all else is a scientist,” fellow showrunner Travis Fickett explained. “She’s going to take evidence into account and that will change her assumptions about things. She’s going to get some new evidence, but the mission for her next season will become even more personal.”

Meanwhile, Cole (Aaron Stanford) and Cassie (Amanda Schull) finally come face-to-face with Ramse (Kirk Acevedo) at the Temporal Facility in 2015. Ramse tries to explain that he is not The Witness — the mysterious leader of the 12 Monkeys — during a standoff, but Cassie doesn’t buy a word he’s saying. That results in a firefight that ends with both Cassie and Ramse shot.

In order to save Cassie’s life, Ramse then offers Cole the time travel serum he planned on using to return to 2043. Cole injects Cassie with the serum and sends her to Jones in 2043. Cole leaves Ramse to bleed out, but in a change of heart returns to save his former best friend.

“He’s still his brother. Ultimately everything that has transpired between these guys doesn’t undo the bond they have and share,” Matalas explained. “Even the Striking Woman’s last line in the finale is, ‘There is nothing more powerful than fate,’ and Cole proves there is something more powerful than fate and that’s love. He goes back to save his brother.”

But don’t expect everything to be patched up. “They have a whole lot to sort out in season two,” Fickett adds.

The relationship between Cole and Ramse isn’t the only one the showrunners are aiming to explore in season two.

“We’re going to lean a lot more into the relationships” Matalas says. “Season one was more about setting the dynamics between Cole and Ramse, Cole and Cassie, Jones and Ramse, Jones and Cole, Jennifer and Cole. We’re going to spend a lot more exploring those relationships and delving a lot deeper. We plan on taking a breath or two next season to sit with our characters more and let them talk.”

“Having established them in this season we can do that now. The scenes will be more effective because of it,” Fickett added.

Time traveling will also see a change of scenery next season. Matalas noted the Syfy series will explore new time periods as well “an exploration into a deeper past.”

When it comes to the identity of The Witness, Fickett assures fans will learn the truth of who is behind the mask next season along with more about the mysterious Red Forest. “You’ll know exactly what the Red Forest is and what it means for the whole world in season two.”

“The second season is definitely a more emotional season,” Matalas noted, with Fickett adding: “And maybe a bit scarier. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, but there is still hope.”

What did you think of the 12 Monkeys season finale? Sound off in the comments below.

April 10, 2015 2:06pm PT by Bilal Mian

 Barry Wetcher

“One of the great things about playing a fallible superhero, one who doesn’t necessarily have super powers, is that the stakes are raised by the prospect of them perishing,” the actor tells THR.

[Warning: This story contains spoilers from the first few episodes of Netflix’s Daredevil.]

The road to redemption has officially begun as Daredevil — aka “The Man Without Fear” — has officially bowed on Netflix.

The first of five Netflix series, Daredevil‘s television adaptation sets its focus on Hell’s Kitchen in New York, a district recovering from the Chitauri Invasion that destroyed nearly half the island. As a result, organized crime has taken roots in the recovery efforts making Hell’s Kitchen a dangerous place to live. Matt Murdock (Boardwalk Empire’s Charlie Cox), a blind lawyer, decides to take matters into his own hands by donning a black mask to deliver vigilante justice in order to save the city he loves.

The Hollywood Report spoke with Cox about what it means to be Daredevil and the relationships he shares with the people around him.

How important was Matt Murdock’s mortality in portraying the superhero?

One of the great things about playing a fallible superhero, one who doesn’t necessarily have super powers, is that the stakes are raised by the prospect of them perishing. I always have trouble with movies that have ambiguity over whether a character can die or not. If these characters are human, they’re not invincible and then obviously it helps increase the stakes for the show. That was a selling factor for me, a cool element of the show and something that would hopefully keep the fans on the edge of their seat.

One of the more interesting aspects of Murdock is his Catholicism. You don’t see many other superheroes having a religion. With everything that has transpired, why does he still look to religion for insight?

I grew up Catholic, and when you’ve grown up and these belief systems have been presented to you at a young, impressionable age, I don’t know that you can shake them. Even if your rational mind tells you something else, sometimes they’re so deeply ingrained that they are with you for the rest of your life. Maybe that’s not true for everyone. Matt’s faith is quite strong and he has come to rely on it — although at times it puts him in a difficult position because of who he is and what he does and what he’s capable of. Part of his journey as a Catholic is to find harmony around his religion and faith, as well as who he is as Daredevil. It’s a wonderful dichotomy for an actor to play because it produces so much conflict and inner turmoil.

In the first two episodes, we see the backstory with his father (John Patrick Hayden). Do you think Matt blames himself for the death of his father?

That’s something that’s explored differently in the comics. I don’t think he, as an adult, blames himself. Rationally, he knows that who his father was, how he behaved, and the people he got mixed up with was not influenced in any way by Matt. But at the same time, I think from what I’ve read, any child who loses a parent or sibling in a tragic way like that takes on some of the blame. It’s almost easier to take on the blame because it’s a way of protecting yourself from hating the world. It’s almost like if you could find someone to blame it takes away a bit of the pain. With Matt, that’s a real possibility. Obviously Matt was very proud of his father and what he did. He thought he was a hero and so, that element definitely played into it.

What drives Matt to want to protect the city, especially from Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), at all costs?

Matt doesn’t initially know Wilson Fisk. When we meet Matt Murdock, he’s just started this masked vigilantism at night. He’s aware very quickly, however, that there is someone or something that is infecting the city. There is some greater power above all of everything that is going on, all of the criminal activity, and he discovers as the show goes on that this person has a name. As the show goes on, we find out more about Wilson Fisk. What happens with Matt is that initially he just gets in too deep. He follows one foot after another until he reaches a place where he knows he can’t stop and has to see it through. He has to find this guy and end it. Naybe he thinks that in accomplishing it, he’ll be able to hang up his gloves, as it were, and move on. But that’s more of an unknown.

Do you think Matt goes back and forth with his identity? He’s a lawyer by day but at night he goes out and breaks those laws, is that turmoil seen within him during the course of the season?

Very much so. One of the things I loved about the show and the writing is that though we had these very exciting fighting sequences and the energy and pace of the show is quick and thrilling, we also punctuate those scenes with very long, emotional, character-driven material. We’ve got these wonderful conflicts presented to Matt, being both superhero, Catholic, masked vigilante and then we get those wonderful scenes where we see him struggle with those conflicting desires and beliefs within him. It’s one of my favorite things about the show because I relate to that inner-conflict, being surrounded by one’s life and decisions and what one believes to be the right path.

The Matt and Foggy (Elden Henson) relationship is great since Foggy is one of the few normal, grounded humans on the show. How important is his relationship with Matt and does Matt pose a danger to Foggy by doing what he does?

One of the things that Matt struggles with as he continues this journey is that he’s incredibly aware of the possibilities involving the people who are close to him. At one point, he even tries to alienate the people he loves so that he doesn’t put them in danger. The idea that what he’s doing could affect the people he loves is immensely frightening to him, more than anything else. I find it interesting when you have two best friends who don’t seem to have any other best friends and that’s almost the case with Matt and Foggy. They’re loners in their own way but they clung on to each other and they’re able to hide in their friendship with one another. You’ve got two best friends who spend all their time together, went to college together, and yet Matt has been able to hide this great secret of his from his best friend for all those years. That says a lot about a relationship, not to undermine it at all, [but] I think they care about each other greatly, but it’s another added beautiful complication to what it is to be human.

Episode two introduced Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple, who seems to be a foil for Matt and grounds him. After hitting it off quickly, is a romantic relationship in the cards?

She’s the first person ever to know about him; the first person in his whole life that he can be himself with. When he’s with Claire, Matt doesn’t have to pretend anything. It’s the first time ever he’s been really vulnerable with another human being. He’s completely exposed. That’s massive. She help gets him patched up and he begins to rely on her emotionally. He craves the opportunity to talk about who he truly is in front of someone and she’s someone he can talk about it with. He can gauge her opinion on what he’s doing, which is important to him. It encourages him. Similarly, Claire is also kind of a bit of a lost soul, a loner who doesn’t really fit into this world she’s in. She’s found many of the same comforts from being his friend as he does from her. Iit’s not surprising that there’s the inkling of a romantic relationship because when two people identify so much with one another, a romantic relationship is often formed.

What is that catalyst that propels Matt from vigilante to superhero?

The first season is about that journey. We meet young Matt and we see the evolution of his character. The answer to your question, I really think that’s up to the audience to decide what the difference is between vigilante justice and superhero justice. A lot of that will be discussed when we get to the introduction of the superhero suit because it’s not just about putting on a suit for the sake of putting on a suit. There’s a purpose, reasons for doing so. There’s a lot of discussion about function and form, how it’s made and who makes it. I think the answer to that question is up for debate and for each audience member to decide.

When it comes to the action sequences, how much did you prepare and how much were you allowed to do? Could you actually see through that mask?

The mask was made of this special material, which was genius because you could see quite clearly through it but when you look at it, it looks solid. I did as much martial arts training as I could and spent a lot of time with the stunt coordinator and my stunt double as much as possible. I had a long conversation about the kind of martial arts Matt did. I want to do as much as I’m allowed to do, as much as the insurance companies will allow me to do, which turned out to be quite a lot. That’s the great thing about our show: it’s grounded in reality. A lot of the fight sequences really are just two men rolling around trying to hit one another. I didn’t have to learn a great deal of very stylized movements. I did a lot but obviously as the show progresses Matt’s fighting ability becomes more fine-tuned and his ability increases so my stunt double had to do a lot more of the specialized moves. He did things I didn’t even know human beings could do. But right up until the very end I was doing as much as allowed and I loved it.

Are you watching Daredevil? What do you think so far? Stay tuned to The Live Feed for more coverage in the coming days.

April 08, 2015 26 minutes ago by Bilal Mian

 Courtesy of Netflix; AP Images/Invision

“There is an over-arching global plan culminating in The Defenders and some of that groundwork has been laid in Daredevil,” Steven DeKnight tells THR.

Marvel is looking to change what it means to be a hero with Daredevil, the first of five comic book adaptations headed to Netflix.

Daredevil‘s television adaptation finds Matt Murdock (Boardwalk Empire’s Charlie Cox) a blind lawyer by day and donning a black mask at night as he takes to streets to deliver justice in Hell’s Kitchen.

Unlike the other heroes in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, Murdock’s mortality is much more evident. The vigilante has no suit of armor or fast healing ability; the only thing he has going for him are his enhanced senses. As organized crime rises through the neighborhood, Murdock learns that the corruption runs deeper than he could have imagined. Willing to do whatever it takes to make a difference, Murdock must come face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, where a single mistake could cost him his life.

The Hollywood Report caught up with showrunner Steven DeKnight (Spartacus) to discuss bringing the MCU down to a city scale, the challenges Murdock faces and how Daredevil and its upcoming Netflix brethren Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Defenders fit in.

The MCU has been grounded in a global, super-powered world with Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. Daredevil is smaller in scale and more human. What was roadmap like for creating a world for street-level superheroes?

This was [Marvel head of television] Jeff Loeb‘s brainchild. He had this idea for taking the street-level heroes from the Marvel Universe — characters like Matt Murdock, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Danny Rand who is Iron Fist — and really focusing in on them in a TV series where they’re all interconnected like in the MCU did with Iron Man, Thor and Captain America culminating in The Avengers. Loeb wanted to make a gritty, grounded and realistic [series], hearkening back to those Daredevil comics we read as kids — the Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev runs. He wanted to make them smaller and more intimate. He wanted to make this more of a crime drama that just happens to exist in the Marvel Universe. He mentioned The Wire and I immediately perked up and said, “You know, no one will ever make another Wire, but that is an excellent thing to shoot toward.” On a TV scale, you can’t match what they do in the movies. What you can do is shoot for a premium cable feel and make things more “PG-15” than you can in the movies. The movies have to reach a broader audience. With Netflix, we could zero in on something specific, realizing that this isn’t for everyone. It’s not for younger audience members.

How will Daredevil set the stage for Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and The Defenders? Is the plan to cycle through all five every year?

There is an over-arching global plan culminating in The Defenders and some of that groundwork has been laid in Daredevil. I’ve had people ask me if Jessica Jones or Luke Cage make an appearance in Daredevil this season and my answer is unfortunately no because we were operating pretty much in a vacuum with this first one. Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg (Twilight) is adapting Bendis’ graphic novel. I was shooting the finale when Krysten Ritter was cast as Jessica Jones. With Daredevil being the first out of the gate, we didn’t have the opportunity to cross-pollinate with other shows because they still in their formative stages. My hope is moving forward with Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist now we will see more cross-pollination. There is a global plan moving toward [miniseries] The Defenders. We started to put things in place.

How will Daredevil fit in with the rest of the MCU in terms of ABC’s Agent Carter/Agents of SHIELD where “everything is connected”? Is it just the Defenders-verse or does it tie-in with everything else?

We definitely exist in the MCU, but we’re the first TV show since Marvel Studios started producing their own stuff with Iron Man that isn’t actually spun off from the movies. We have a very liberating reading format where we don’t have to connect as strongly as Agents of SHIELD or Agent Carter had to since they had a direct lineage from movies. With us, we exist in the universe. We reference the Battle of New York and Iron Man and Thor, but I’ve always approached it that it’s like a normal person living in the real world. How often do they meet Brad Pitt or sit next to George Clooney? You know these people exist, but you hardly ever get to see them in person even if you live in Los Angeles. We’re a part of the MCU but we don’t have the burden of having to interlock so strongly with what the movies are doing. We’ll reference them, but this is in its own little corner of the MCU.

The action in Daredevil is brutal and, at times, hard to watch. Were there any restrictions on that from Netflix and/or Marvel?  

Netflix was fine, much like HBO, Showtime or Starz. There are no classic standards of practice like there is on network television. They are fine going for the more mature audience. There is, however, some self-regulation on my side and Marvel’s side. None of us wanted to take this to an R-rated show. The Daredevil character warrants things being grittier and a little more violent. I didn’t want to take it to an R-rating. I often use a show that I love as an example, AMC’s The Walking Dead. The violence in their show is what I would call very R-rated; it’s very graphic and I love it. We didn’t want to go quite that far on Daredevil. You’ll notice a lot of the violence is visceral and impactful but more suggestive than graphic. In episode four, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) loses control and has a run-in with the Russian. It’s very disturbing and definitely more violent than something you will see in a Marvel movie. Because of that, it makes it feel more graphic than it is. We were still cognizant of the fact that we didn’t want to push it all the way to the envelope.

When it comes to street level heroes like Daredevil, how important is his morality in defining the hero?

It’s really important. One of the things that attracted me to Daredevil as a kid was the fact that Murdock is built on one dichotomy after another. The most obvious one being that he’s a lawyer by day sworn to uphold the legal system and then by night he goes out and breaks all those rules. Add on top of that, his father never wanted him to fight and every night he goes out and fights. He wants to think his father would be proud but there’s another part of him that knows his father would be disappointed in how he’s doing it. And mixed on top of that he’s a devout Catholic in the comics and it makes for such a wonderful internal struggle with Murdock. That’s something we really wanted to pay attention to in this first season. He’s very new at being a vigilante; how far will he take it? It’s a question he struggles with most of the season. I’ve always said he’s one bad day away from becoming the Punisher and that’s something we wanted to look at in that moral quandary.

What separates a vigilante from a superhero and what is the catalyst for the transformation?

If you take it as far as actively going out to kill people, that crosses a very strong line and that’s why some of my favorite Daredevil comics were when he runs up against the Punisher. It’s two guys who are ostensibly doing the same thing, but it is just Frank Castle taking it one step further. It was a really fascinating part of this season for me. As the show progress beyond episode five, we get into it much more deeply about Matt’s desire to save his city and his frustration at what he’s been doing and how he’s been doing it. It isn’t effective enough and should he take that next step. The obvious logical step for him to stop what’s going on is to kill Wilson Fisk and that is the moral quandary: Should he or shouldn’t he do that.

Most threats in the MCU have come on a global scale. What are challenges in conveying a threat when scaling it down to a district in a city?

As long as you have a really great antagonist, this story naturally falls into place; the bones are there. Toward the end of the season we started to have discussions about if the story was big enough. We started talking about if we should put Matt in a situation where there’s a building about to explode with people in it and Matt goes into to save them. That’s more of an external conflict where a lot of our conflicts are internal in this show. I used to say in the writers’ room that this show was built on man vs. man and man vs. himself. It’s not that we’ve got to save the world. It’s more save the neighborhood. To a certain extent, exploring the ideas of how do you do that without losing a chunk of soul in the process. We explore that on both sides with Matt and the other side of the coin, Wilson Fisk. They are two sides of the same coin and it helps to have an antagonist like Wilson Fisk who is human; there’s nothing superhuman about him. Vincent D’Onofrio who got what we were trying to with making Fisk, a human and three-dimensional character. We always wanted the audience to go, “Yeah, he’s the bad guy,” but still in a way they may be rooting for him. That’s also why Wilson Fisk has the big love story of the season and not the hero, which an unusual way to go about it but again we really wanted to round out who the antagonist was and his motivations.

Season one of Daredevil drops Friday on Netflix. Will you be watching?