Daredevil season three is streaming now on Netflix (check out our review here!). Have you gotten to episode four yet? We really need to talk about how impressive a feat that was…
Marvel’s Daredevil series quickly became famous for its creative fight scenes. Particularly, hallway fight scenes. There were attempts to recreate the greatness of the season one choreography, and bring the same feeling to the other Marvel/Netflix series, but the hype never lived up to the expectations for me after that first one.
That’s why, when the creators starting talking about what they cooked up for season three, I didn’t get my hopes up. That meant I was happily surprised by “Blindsided”.
Directed by Alex Garcia Lopez and written by Tonya Kong and Sarah Streicher, the episode has Matt entering a prison, pretending to be Foggy, in order to get more information to take down Wilson Fisk. However, he wasn’t adequately prepared for what he’d find out there, nor what he’d face. The prison was filled with men on Fisk’s payroll and they were out for Matt’s blood.
What followed was a marathon fight to get out of the prison that took us through the entire building and back outside again. The sequence takes about 11 minutes.
And it was filmed in one take.
Speaking with Digital Spy, star Charlie Cox described the work that went into the huge sequence. “They actually gave us an entire day off just to rehearse, with everyone,” he told them. “Not just the stunt team and the actors, but also the camera crew, the sound department.”
Turn around and walk the other way. pic.twitter.com/rdR8XFkGIj
— Daredevil (@Daredevil) October 18, 2018
Incredible barely covers it, to be honest. As I watched Cox straining to catch his breath and realised they hadn’t cut yet, I knew I had to watch it all again immediately. Normally, when a large one-take is filmed, the production inserts specific areas where they can cheat if necessary. Cox thought they’d have to rely on those cheats, but in the end they didn’t, and he called that a “real testament to the stunt team”.
He said, “We did a couple of takes that were quite good, and then we had a couple of false starts. And then after lunch, we came back, and we just had this one take that went monumentally well, and every single moment worked… We couldn’t believe it. There were huge celebrations and cheering.”
While he wasn’t there on the day of filming, showrunner Erik Oleson told The Washington Post, “It was, as you can probably imagine, just terrific jolt of adrenaline to everybody in the cast and the crew that they were able to pull off this epic sequence early on in our production schedule. It set a bar… The morale of the crew continued to be insanely high all the way through the finale, in no small part because of what we managed to pull off with this sequence.”