Warning: The article contains major spoilers for the finale of “Daredevil: Born Again.”
The first season of “Daredevil: Born Again” saved its bloodiest episode for last, and that’s saying a lot. The season opened with the death of a major character and featured no shortage of violence, including the terrifying reign of terror by Muse (Hunter Doohan), a serial killer who uses his victim’s blood as paint.
The finale features an epic Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Punisher (Jon Bernthal) team-up that results in insane levels of arterial spray, and yet the bloodletting pales in comparison to the episode’s most shocking moment: the brutal demise of Commissioner Gallo (Michael Gaston).
All season long, Gallo proved to be a thorn in the side of Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), culminating in a final confrontation that saw Gallo unwittingly summoned to his doom. It’s a pivotal moment, not just for Fisk but New York City as a whole. Fisk takes out an enemy in a vulgar display of power to galvanize his growing army of enforcers, with nothing more than his bare hands and brutal strength.
“He always didn’t trust Wilson Fisk,” Gaston tells Bloody Disgusting of Gallo’s mindset heading into that fateful confrontation. “That was always there, especially from their interactions earlier in the season. I think he didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but the way that scene plays out, by the time he gets there, he knows. He doesn’t put up much of a fight, as you notice. He knows which way the wind is blowing, and he knows who he’s dealing with. I think there was a resignation; Gallo knows what’s coming his way, and he’s made his piece in the car with the young man who’s there to replace his driver. He knows at that point, when he sees the kid’s tattoo, that this is it.
“There’s no fight. There’s no point in fighting again. He has no idea just how insanely grisly and how violent it’s going to be. But he knows it’s going to end.”
(L-R) Commisioner Phil (Michael Gaston) and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL.
For Fisk, the gruesome murder of Gallo is his unmasking in a season where he’s tried to tamp down his violent urges as the city’s new mayor. D’Onofrio explains, “[Fisk] has other people doing his bad stuff for a while. The public doesn’t know about Adam; nobody else knows about Adam, but eventually Vanessa, right? This is the first time he, in front of the police force, exercises what he is telling them to do: get everybody that’s in our way out of the way. But he took it very personally that Commissioner Gallo just tried to sidetrack him. He felt there was this gray area with Sheila [Zabryna Guevara] in his office, and Gallo threatened him many times with the fact that he knew that he was a criminal. He wouldn’t shut up, so he had to go.”
Gallo resigns to his fate as Fisk crushes his head between his palms, a grim and ruthless demise handled practically with stunning photorealism and unconventional design. This isn’t just your average head crushing effect. The chilling scene and its centerpiece effect becomes even more impressive with the context that this key death came late in the creative process. The finale’s directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the filmmaking duo behind films like Spring and The Endless, learned about the story beat while deep into prep.
“When we came on board in the second round of filming, the beat did not exist yet, and there was no hint at it,” Moorhead reveals. “There were just some rather broad aims for where to go, but not even story aims exactly, more just like how it would feel. Then as we started working on it with Dario Scardapane, our showrunner, the story started to come into focus with working in order from episodes one and then working through the reshoots or the additional photography of the rest, and then eight and nine. I think it was pretty deep into prep on episode one or even while shooting episode one, and then it was just right when we read episode nine or read the outline when they’re like, ‘And we’re going to crush his head.’
(L-R) Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL
It’s a simple yet vague description wide open for interpretation, but one thing was certain, according to Moorhead: “From the very first time the sentence, ‘He crushes his head,‘ was written, it was going to be practical. It’s because we were directing it. We would very much insist on that. But I actually think most filmmakers would want to because it just makes more sense, and actually, it’s funny to say this, but the VFX department prefers it, too. They prefer that you do as much as you possibly can in camera, and then they just push it any further distance you need. It’s not an effort thing. It’s that they also believed that if you actually shoot it, it looks better.”
Benson and Moorhead were clued in on the fate of Gallo’s character much sooner than the actor playing him. “Oh, I didn’t know it,“ Gaston confirms. “But there are ways when you’ve been doing this for as long as I have when you know how many episodes you’re being promised, it’s not indefinite, and they’re not trying to lock you up for a period of years. Well, and I get killed a lot. I actually added them up recently for something that I’m writing, but I’ve died 21 times on camera over the years. This was the 20th of 21. There’s been a death since then, not quite as grisly, but similarly grisly, and involved a lot of the same techniques.“ But how does this death rank for Gaston? “Oh, it is, I would say, the most colorful. It is the most dynamic. Let’s just say it’s pretty shocking, what happens to me.“
If Gaston took the death in stride, D’Onofrio quickly latched onto what a monumental turning point Gallo’s murder was for Fisk. So much so that the actor became the driving force behind this gruesome on-screen death. Benson tells BD, “I remember every time we’d be at the studio, walking through the hallways and running into Vincent. We became close with Vincent really quickly, one of our best friends now today, but every time we walked through the studio and ran into him, he’d be like, ‘Guys, I think we should talk. Let’s talk about this head crush scene.‘ Vincent was obsessed with this head crush, and I only say that half joking. He was really the team leader on this thing.“
“We thought we were pretty excited about doing it,“ Moorhead says. “We were pretty excited, but he was all in.”
(L-R) Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL.
“I worked with everybody very closely; the special effects people, the the directors, Aaron and Justin, the producer, Sana [Amanat],” D’Onofrio says of spearheading this scene. “They were kind enough to let me take the lead. I had a particular idea. It was written as a skull crush, but I didn’t want to participate in what we usually see in movies when people get their skulls crushed. It’s always thumbs in the eyes and stuff like that. I just thought that it was important to match the blatant, raw brutality of the decapitation in the original series. That he’s willing to get his hands dirty and in the most disgusting way. Aaron, to block it, I positioned him in front of me, and I just walked everybody through the move of the actual crushing.“
“I became his head crush model,“ Moorhead corroborates. “And I will tell you, Vincent actually is six foot four. He does have large hands, and it is rather frightening, as an actor really gets into it, and he’s holding your head. He was very gentle, but you still can’t help but get in your head about it.“
D’Onofrio expands on the crushing effect and his vision, “It was more just not having any empathy at all, and just finding the right position with his body to crush the head. It sounds so gross when I talk about it, but I wanted it to be brutal and that the head collapses and tears, which is the surprise gore. It looks so good. It looks just like Gallo. We were all just so freaked out when we first saw the waist-up sculpture of him. But when we saw the finished product, everybody was just amazed with our effects people. The way that I wanted to do it, we were actually able to do it when we were shooting. There’s this casual pop in the neck that I gave him first to make him go down on his knees, and then that’s it. And then I just get behind him. It was a particular way that I wanted to execute it.“
Benson and Moorhead have plenty of experience working in horror with practical effects, but the vision for Commissioner Gallo’s death presented a unique task for the effects teams, especially with TV’s time constraints. Instead of the usual lifecasting process, the special makeup effects team took an innovative approach to a skull crush achieved entirely on camera without the need for extensive VFX cleanup. “I remember talking to the special effects and makeup effects departments about how we were going to do it,“ Benson recalls. “Aaron and I have done, obviously, a lot of work with casting molds and we’ve had that done to ourselves. We didn’t have a lot of experience with the method they used here, which was 3D scanning. We hadn’t had a whole lot of experience with that, and I think that was one of the reasons why we were shocked at how photo-real it was just in camera.“
Behind the scenes in Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL
Moorhead stresses this impressive effect, “But it did just work on camera. Everybody who was watching it recoiled because it just felt like a snuff film. I have a photo from behind the scenes on my phone. If anyone ever catches me, I’ll show it to you of Vincent gleefully covered in blood, holding this head. And I love this image, but the problem is, it’s in my favorites on my phone; if I’m scrolling through, it’s just like, ‘Dog, dog, dog,‘ and then, ‘Gore.‘ I keep forgetting, like, ‘This isn’t real, and other people that are seeing it; they’re just shocked.‘”
Two critical members of the special makeup effects team who were responsible for bringing this effect to life are Lisa Forst (Birth/Rebirth, “Evil) and Brandon Grether (Werewolves Within). The artists didn’t have scripts to go on when creating the effect, which they learned from makeup department head Kimberly Amacker and D’Onofrio. “Vincent did come up to us on set and tell us that this was a turning point for his character, and it was a very important scene, and he told us a bit about it,“ Forst says.
“But just that he wanted to be very impactful and very violent, and we just sort of went from there,“ Grether adds.
Forst reiterates that their design process was as much informed by D’Onofrio’s direction and the desire to deviate from your standard skull crush. It led to the design decision to tear Gallo’s head apart instead of imploding inward. “We wanted to do our own thing instead of just doing a plain implosion because we didn’t want it to look cheesy. We know Vincent didn’t want it to look cheesy, so we kind of asked, ‘Can we do our own thing with it?‘“ Forst and Grether started with the unhinging and tearing at the jaw. “Then we added the top of the head, so we made the jaw go one direction, and then the top of the head crushed into the opposite direction, so there would be a lot of movement with it.“
“We definitely talked about Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky a lot and not wanting it to be just that big explosion of blood and no real anatomy. We really wanted to focus on anatomically how it would happen to add a bit of realism, but also still give everyone the gore that they would be excited by,“ Grether cites as an example that guided their design. “Instead of a lifecast, we’ve recently transferred over to doing scans. So we have a portable scanner that’s very high definition. It’s not like a lot of the scans that are done with photogrammetry. Ours is able to pick up all the skin texture, but it’s a little harder to work with; as far as if an actor is moving, it comes out a little patchy and has to be cleaned up. We did a scan of [Gaston] posing in that kind of screaming face. which is something you can’t really do with a lifecast. It was really unique to be like, ‘All right, Michael, just sit here and act like your head is being crushed.’ It was early in the morning, so he’s like, ‘Excuse me?‘ ‘Yeah, scream like your head’s being crushed in.‘”
The artists even scanned the actor’s teeth, further capturing the photorealism. Grether affirms, “Everything’s very accurate to him. We were able to scan him in the full pose. Because it’s a hard pose to hold, there was some digital cleanup we had to do just with his scan. Then we 3D printed his head in multiple pieces, put all the pieces back together, remolded it, and then we were able to work out of that mold for the final castings.“
Behind the scenes of Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL
“It took us three different castings to get the final pattern of how it would break apart that we scored and tested out before we got to the final one,“ Forst adds of the three full silicone heads they crafted from the scans to test for realism and function. “Then, once we got the pattern right on those castings, we added hair by hair punching, which is when you take a needle and add each hair individually into the head; that was done for the mustache, the eyebrows, the eyelashes the sides of his head. We added a wig to the top. We painted it, we 3D printed a jaw to go on the bottom, and that’s what also helped reset it. The jaw locked back into place for each reset, and we added his upper teeth, which were his real teeth.”
Grether further explains, “It’s like a head and bust. It comes down to his shoulders. Then they ended up mounting it on one of those like boxing dummies.”
The duo didn’t just create the head for the death scene, they also worked with the special effects department and did some blood rigging. Considering the nature of the death itself, the scene involved a lot of blood. “We ran the tubes, and then they hooked up to them. So we had one in the jaw, and we had one in the top of the head. We had two blood lines ran to it,“ Forst says.
“I think the phrase we used for how much blood we would use was as much blood as physically possible while still being realistic. That’s also our thesis for the entire season and season two,“ Moorhead stated.
“We also made a couple of 3D-printed nozzles for the bloodlines. It’s always important to make the blood look organic and not just like a hose. That’s always something tricky to do. We printed maybe 20 different patterns of nozzles to get the blood to kind of spatter out how we wanted to,“ Grether shares.
(Fourth from R) Michael Gaston and (Second from Right) Vincent D’Onofrio in Marvel Television’s DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Rufino. © 2025 MARVEL.
Because practical effects with extensive blood tubing typically require a lengthy reset to clean up between takes, Forst and Grether warned the crew on set to expect things to get messy. Grether remembers that the caution meant the first take at capturing the effect on camera was too restrained with the blood splatter, and in the process, reveals that the team nailed the scene on the second take. “Everyone was very concerned about getting covered. On the first take, we dialed everything down, and it was not enough. The second take, we ramped it back up. We went back to our original tests for blood pressure. We added a lot of brain matter. We filled the top of the head completely so that when he crushed it in, all that would blow out inside. Then, when that second take happened, once we could turn and look at the rest of the room, we could see the look on everyone’s faces and knew it was what they wanted.“
As for what this means going forward? Well, it’s safe to say things are looking rather ominous for the citizens of NY. D’Onofrio agrees, “What happens right after that is quite something for a New Yorker. It’s quite something for Fisk to claim martial law in New York City. That’s crazy, you know. That means bridges, tunnels, everything’s locked off. That’s really rough.”
Moorhead teases what’s ahead, “You’ll find out extremely quickly in season two how bad it got with the ‘Resignation of the Commissioner.‘ Also, of course, Fisk put the city under martial law. There’s going to be something really interesting and not exactly what you’d expect to start off with.”
All episodes of “Daredevil: Born Again” are currently streaming on Disney+.