Daredevil's Vincent D'Onofrio Leaves Social Media Amid Disney+ Series Chaos
As new information about behind-the-scenes drama roiling the beleaguered "Daredevil: Born Again" rocked MCU fans, one of the series' biggest stars has logged off. Vincent D'Onofrio, who played Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk in Netflix's "Daredevil" and the Disney+ series "Hawkeye," deleted his social media accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram after leaving behind a heartfelt message for his fans.
In a post on X, D'Onofrio wrote in part, "So everyone i'm [sic] going to leave X. I'm going to leave very soon. To my amazing and loyal followers: You know I have been contemplating this for a long while. Today is the day. I leave you for now with much love to you all." Shortly thereafter, the actor's account, @vincentdonofrio, was deleted from the social media platform. His Instagram account, also @vincentdonofrio, has been taken private.
Only a few days prior, the star was humming a different tune, with D'Onofrio reassuring his followers that the "Daredevil: Born Again" drama, which reportedly involved a total restructuring of the series, was perfectly normal for a project of its scale. Whether he still believes that's the case, it's clear that he doesn't want to be a part of the online discourse for the time being. "I'll come back soon or maybe later," he wrote. "I don't know."
D'Onofrio taps out after a heartfelt message to followers
Vincent D'Onofrio's retreat from social media follows the news that "Daredevil: Born Again," one of the MCU's most highly anticipated upcoming projects, was being completely reworked. The series will star Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock and is planned to be the longest MCU streaming series yet, with an order of 18 episodes. But fewer than half of those had reportedly been shot when Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige reviewed the existing footage. What Feige saw caused him to fire the show's directors and head writers, essentially rebooting the show mid-production to follow a more traditional TV formula.
Whether the changes to "Daredevil: Born Again" will improve the final product is impossible to determine, but the news caused a crisis of faith among many MCU fans — especially after a string of movies and streaming series, from "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" to "Secret Invasion," that were tepidly received. Moreover, the latest "Daredevil" project had already suffered large, public setbacks, with production suspended due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA actors' strike and now-resolved WGA writers' strike, and its due date stricken from Marvel's release calendar.
Although he does not explicitly say so in his post, D'Onofrio may have had enough of the intense focus on himself and his co-stars, especially since he cannot give much insight into the situation without violating the notoriously strict cone of silence Marvel enforces around its unreleased projects. Nor can he say much without breaking SAG-AFTRA's strike rules against promoting struck work. So he's decided that total silence is, for now, his best option.