NetflixDaredevil's costume is, well, a little meh. At least in the beginning—you've seen the new red duds by now on Netflix's Daredevil, which premiered on April 10.
"Yeah, the costume sucks in the beginning, I mean it's pathetic! [My character is] like ‘What's happening right now are you just trying to get beat up?' Maybe you just have a thing for that, maybe it's completely masochistic," Rosario Dawson told E! News about her character's take on Daredevil's superhero duds. "That's actually one of the things I love about this so much is Marvel's genius at comedy. That's what comics have always given us—there's always that little zinger or little line. And you can read it differently in comics sometimes, but when it actually gets articulated, you can see actually how funny these situations are. There's a bunch of people running around in spandex fighting petty crime in their spare time, hilarity will ensue so that's nice to have that."
In Daredevil, Dawson plays Claire Temple, a nurse who helps out Matt Murdock/Daredevil, the lawyer by day/vigilante by night at the center of the show. At the start of his superheroing, Daredevil wears a simple black outfit. But star Charlie Cox wasn't the only one to get to play around with the costume.
"I tried," Elden Henson, Matt Murdock's law partner Foggy Nelson, joked, "but they only made it in sample size. I had way too many donuts at craft service."
Underneath that black (and later red) costume is a ripped Charlie Cox. You've seen those photos and that trailer with the abs for days—"That's the only CGI in the whole show," Cox joked.
"I'd never had a gym membership before and I'm obviously not the physical choice for a superhero. So Steven DeKnight called me up after they had given me the news that I had got the job and said, ‘Alright, we need you put on 20 pounds of muscle in a couple weeks.' So I just started going to the gym and following a trainer around. So we'd walk around and he'd say pick that up and I'd pick it up, and then he'd say pick it up again. And just trying to eat a lot and trying to put on a lot of weight because I was losing so much weight from working out. And I really enjoyed it. It was a really interesting experience," the Boardwalk Empire veteran said. "And I felt like I wasn't making any progress for a long time and then eventually I had to shave my chest—I have a very hairy chest and I had to shave it—and suddenly I was like, ‘Ah, I have made progress.'"
But Cox just doesn't roll up to the set and whip off his shirt for the scenes. There's the aforementioned chest shave and "a whole routine."
"You have to not drink much water and then you eat donuts right before because you get sugar…and you do 20 press-ups and apparently you look [bulks up his body]," Cox said. "On the set, there was a lot of the guys of the crew that were like properly big muscular men, so I felt very lame in front of those guys."
Marvel's Daredevil is now streaming on Netflix.
—Reporting by Alyssa Toomey