Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin has been Marvel’s best villain for a decade
Despite the MCU’s attempts to replicate the long-running stories from the comics, supervillains tend not to last long. It’s a tradition in films dating back to the ’90s era where Batman inevitably drops the villain off a roof before the credits roll, something that even Marvel’s interconnectedness can’t seem to solve. And even those in the MCU that Doing returning regularly, like Thanos and Loki, have either built up over time or changed their loyalties.
The biggest outlier of this rule, however, remains Wilson Fisk, also known as the Kingpin. As portrayed in heated, idiosyncratic fashion by the great Vincent D’Onofrio, the Kingpin has been around in the MCU for almost a decade, and a large part of that is thanks to D’Onofrio’s effortless ability to use his talents and the character’s own traits applying. what best suits a particular series.
Wilson Fisk could be D’Onofrio’s magnum opus when it comes to his command of a kind of unhinged, striking physicality. The best-known example is his performance as the tragic Leonard ‘Gomer Pyle’ Lawrence in Full metal jacket, a man slowly torn apart by the pressures of boot camp, eventually becoming a ghostly, murderous shell of himself. There’s also the manic, bug-ridden Edgar Men in black and Conan the Barbarian creator (and amateur boxer/weightlifter) Robert Howard in The whole wide world, an underplayed performance that D’Onofrio plays with electric pathos. He often plays a man swinging against the world, and he can do this with ease in both comedy and introspective drama. As Fisk, he constantly struggles with himself (and everyone else). Few characters are as comfortable desperately grasping for family ties, expressing boyish vulnerability, controlling an urban landscape, or beating a man to death with their bare hands as D’Onofrio’s Fisk.
Photo: David Lee/Netflix
All of this would come in handy in the Netflix original Daredevil series, a show that used Fisk and the titular hero as dual emotional backbones. But perhaps it’s Fisk who carries the broadest spectrum of the show’s core on his broad shoulders – Daredevil, which would introduce the Punisher in the second season, asked, “How do we grapple with human nature and what are we going to show the world for it?” Fisk embodied this question every step of the way. Fisk doesn’t want to be a hero, but he does have a moral code of sorts that puts him forever at odds with his path.
It takes a lot out of him, especially in a genre that tends to wrap up stories with a slam-bang set piece with special effects or (in the case of Daredevil) a brutal fight sequence. But D’Onofrio is able to further channel Fisk into a satisfying bull-in-a-china-shop rage, rather than treating it as the expected dessert for a storytelling meal. He roars in pain and anger at the same time, a man who knows he has never quite learned to control his most chaotic instincts, nor has he made peace with that knowledge.
His handling of the complexities of violence was matched by his ability to execute it in outrageous ways. D’Onofrio returned to play Fisk in the final episodes of Hawkeye, a series that was removed from the small Marvel corner it had been playing with on Netflix and shoved into the building blocks of the MCU. Here, Fisk was no less complex, but – given the higher stakes of a franchise that had just wrapped up a battle with a space warlord – he had to ramp up the cartoonishness of his abilities a bit to match his final boss form.
But thanks to D’Onofrio, even surviving a car crash and an explosion feels at least a little grounded, so tied is the Kingpin’s monstrous strength to his insane (and sometimes even relatable) ambition. Some villains require you to dig deep to discover what unites them with the wider humanity. Fisk wears it on his flowing sleeves. The tone is a bit more hopeful and fantastic than the grainy one Daredevil, but D’Onofrio never lets his role descend into absurdity. (Few actors can look so terrifying in a white suit and bright Hawaiian shirt.)
His portrayal doesn’t come out of nowhere; D’Onofrio has thought about his approach and is open about it his embrace of comic book source material. You can find shades of his exploits in comics throughout time, whether in the character’s megalomaniacal, physically overwhelming early days or in his lovelorn saga in the ’80s, when he had completely transitioned from Spider-Man to B-list enemy to a A thorn in Daredevil’s side. In fact, D’Onofrio’s commanding grace amid outbursts of outrage seems a bit reminiscent of his role in the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon, where the Kingpin truly had his hands in everything, no matter how bizarre or complex. And when his hostility bubbles over, it’s easy to remember the Kingpin of the nascent Ultimate Spider-Man comics and the disturbing ease with which he veered into depravity and hasty violence.
This spectrum of physicality, personality and comic faithfulness serves D’Onofrio well when he plays the lead role Echo, a series with much more bloodletting than we are used to seeing in the Disney Plus MCU offering. And Wilson Fisk is on fine form, assuming patriarch status in a way that’s both unpredictable and strangely heartwarming. But of course he’s still the Kingpin, which means even his noblest intentions (as we sometimes saw in Daredevil) can be undermined by his desire for control and his inability to express himself in a way that doesn’t cave in someone’s skull. And considering what the actor has said about the upcoming Daredevil: Born Againcan we expect more of that?
The MCU’s best villains (Killmonger and Vulture, to name a few) are characters with motivations we understand – and possibly even relate to. And D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk can easily be added to that list. By creating such a three-dimensional character and turning up the dial on a few key facets, he can tackle anything that comes his way, emotional or narrative. The Kingpin may never be able to completely rule New York City, but he can certainly handle whatever the MCU throws at him.
Echo is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu.