Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin has spent a decade as Marvel’s best villain

11.01.2024 - 15:54 / polygon.com / Wilson Fisk / Vincent Donofrio / Best

Despite the MCU’s attempts at replicating the long-running stories of the comics, supervillains tend to not last very long. It’s a tradition in movies dating back to the ’90s era of Batman inevitably dropping the bad guy off a roof before the credits rolled, something not even Marvel’s interconnectedness can seem to fix. And even those in the MCU that do regularly reoccur, like Thanos and Loki, are either built up over time or flip-flop their allegiances.

The biggest outlier to this rule, though, remains Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin. As portrayed in heated, idiosyncratic fashion by the wonderful Vincent D’Onofrio, the Kingpin has been around the MCU for almost a decade, and a lot of that is due to D’Onofrio’s effortless ability to apply his talents and the character’s own attributes to whatever best fits a certain series.

Wilson Fisk might be D’Onofrio’s magnum opus when it comes to his mastery of a kind of unhinged, striking physicality. The most famous example is his performance as the tragic Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence in Full Metal Jacket, a man who is slowly torn apart by the pressures of boot camp and ends up a haunted, murderous shell of himself. There’s also the manic, bug-infested Edgar in Men in Black and Conan the Barbarian creator (and amateur boxer/weightlifter) Robert Howard in The Whole Wide World, an underseen performance that D’Onofrio plays with electric pathos. He often plays a man swinging against the world, and he can do this in both comedy and introspective drama with ease. As Fisk, he constantly wrestles with himself (and everyone else). Few characters are as comfortable grasping desperately for familial ties, expressing boyish vulnerability, controlling an urban landscape, or beating a man to death with their bare hands as D’Onofrio’s Fisk.

All of this would come in handy in the original Netflix Daredevil series, a show that used Fisk and the titular hero as dual emotional backbones. But it’s perhaps Fisk that carries the widest spectrum of the show’s core on his broad shoulders — Daredevil, which would go on to introduce the Punisher in its second season, asked, “How do we struggle with human nature and what will we 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 leaves him forever at odds with his path.

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It demands a lot of him, especially in a genre that tends to wrap up narratives either with a slam-bang special effects set-piece or (in the case of Daredevil) a brutal fight sequence. But D’Onofrio, rather than treat these as the expected dessert for a storytelling meal, is able to further channel Fisk into satisfying bull-in-a-china-shop rage. He bellows in