Charlie Cox Intentionally Blinded Himself To Play Daredevil
Actors who follow Method acting like to immerse themselves into their role blurring the line between their real selves and their characters. Often they stay in character on set, which unnerves co-stars, especially if they go to extreme lengths to elicit a great performance. Daniel Day Lewis spent almost the entire shoot of My Left Foot in a wheelchair, Christian Bale lost 60 pounds to play an emaciated insomniac in The Machinist, and Jamie Foxx glued his eyes shut for 14 hours a day to play blind pianist Ray Charles in Ray.
If done well, that degree of realism sets them on the path to the Oscars.
It might surprise many that some actors playing larger-than-life characters in the worlds of DC and Marvel also follow the Method. That’s a scary thought, especially since Jared Leto stayed in character as the psychotic Joker in between takes on and off the set during Suicide Squad’s production. This made co-stars Margot Robbie and Will Smith a little on edge. But even in the fantastical world of superheroes, characters with superhuman abilities also deal with the same emotions and life conditions (whether mental or physical) as real people. Often they gain powers through an accident or medical condition. Audiences can connect with these real-life traumas, and emotional problems, in a way they can’t with super-human abilities.
Like Leto, Charlie Cox who plays Matt Murdock on Netflix’s Daredevil revealed in a Netflix interview he also used “the Method” in the first season of the Netflix show. Understandably, Cox needed to make sense of blindness, which permeates every action, movement, and interaction in his performance. And what better way to do it than by going intentionally blind. At least that is what he initially thought.
As Cox explained, his approach to blindness was extreme:
“For the first episode I had a pair of contacts made, that replicated my retinas that did completely blind me. But it ended up being such a nightmare for everyone because I was having to be led around the set. I couldn’t see anything, and it was really just an experiment, I guess. And it actually didn’t work pretty well for what I was trying to achieve.”
Cox added that after he discarded the lenses he found a more successful method to study and emulate blindness.
“I worked with a gentleman who has been legally blind for twenty years. I filmed him, copied him, and just tried to make that work with the camera which is a slightly different process.”
Of course, Daredevil is not your normal blind man. The radioactive exposure that caused his blindness also heightened his other senses to an abnormal degree giving a radar or sonar sense. The lenses would have hindered Cox’s performance, because as the actor said:
“You [have] think about how Daredevil operates. It’s important that I see because there are times where I had to grab something or pick something up, but I can’t look at it in order to do it. It happens a lot. And so, if I couldn’t see, I literally wouldn’t be able to do that.”
Of course, Cox is not the only one affected by Matt Murdock/Daredevil’s blindness. His co-stars have to know how to interact with a blind character. Deborah Ann Woll explained the difficulties of not having Cox’s eye line to connect with.
“It’s interesting working like action to cut,” she said. “Charlie won’t look at you for the whole time. And obviously acting is so much about connection so you find other ways to connect… And often actually in closeups, we can’t always tell where your eye line is anyways, cause you don’t have an eye line.”
Viewing the show, it is plain to see how successful Cox emulates the movements and mannerisms of a blind individual. So much so that in 2015 the American Foundation for the Blind honored him for his portrayal of Matt Murdock.
