Yes, Hawkeye’s Kingpin is the same one from Daredevil

Hawkeye is the fifth Marvel TV series to air on Disney+ this year, and it brought with it a wave of cameos and bit parts for MCU standbys. It’s Yelena from Black Widow! Echo is getting her own series! The show capped things off by bringing in Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, a crime boss who has faced down many a Marvel hero in the comics.

What’s more, this particular version of Fisk is played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who also played him in the Netflix show Daredevil. But given Disney’s frosty relationship with those shows — all were cancelled once Disney got its own streaming service going — fans wondered if this was literally the same Kingpin who tangled with Matt Murdock for three seasons over on Netflix or another version of the character also played by D’Onofrio. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the actor put those questions to rest.

“I know that we were picking up with the same guy,” D’Onofrio explained. “It’s tough to connect all the dots, but they connected as many as they could and that he had lost a bit of his power because of the Blip. But the idea [was] to bring him into Hawkeye, to have him be that same character that he was in the earlier show, and play him like that.”

So there you have it: whether or not you think Kingpin lived up to his previous appearances is one question, but it’s the same dude.

Will Vincent D’Onofrio return as Kingpin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

The next question is: Will we see more of D’Onofrio’s Kingpin now that he’s back? We’ll let the man himself field that one:

"For me to say whether that’s going to happen or not, it’s impossible to know for sure. I appreciate the warm welcome from all the fans and everybody out there that have been kind of on social media about wanting me back and now having me back. It’s just a great thing. Just so they all know, my hope is that we continue. We’re just going to have to see what happens. I keep thinking about Daredevil having ended and having to walk away from that. So that’s on my mind too. Maybe it is all over. But I can only hope it’s not."

Hawkeye kept the Kingpin’s ultimate fate vague, which to me all but guarantees he’ll be back. Plus Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock showed up briefly in Spider-Man: No Way Home, so clearly Disney is alright bringing in characters from that show. I think we’ll see the whole lot of them back sooner or later.

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