Ayelet Zurer Reflects On ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ & ‘House Of David’

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details from Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again. 

When Ayelet Zurer reprised her role as Vanessa Fisk, the wife of Vincent D’Onofrio’s supervillain Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin, in Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again, it would be a bittersweet journey for the acclaimed Israeli actress. Zurer had played Kingpin’s wife and closest confidante in the first three seasons of Netflix’s Daredevil before the series was canceled and then resurrected seven years later for Disney+ as Daredevil: Born Again.

Audiences were recently left shocked in the fifth episode of Season 2 when Vanessa, who had been taking on a bigger role in Kingpin’s criminal empire, is mortally wounded in an attack and initially survives long enough to be treated. However, she ultimately succumbs to her injuries by the end of the episode, sending Wilson into a fit of rage and despair. 

“I love Vanessa,” Zurer tells Deadline. “It’s so bizarre because she’s so far away from me. She’s this morally complex art dealer connected to the crime world who serves a very specific aspect of Kingpin. She was written in a way where everything was about honesty and she’s a person who is so used to people lying to themselves and others – people with money, mostly because that’s how she views the world she is in – so she’s kind of jaded.

“But she grew into this very interesting character who could take a lot of shit and at the end of Season One we see her as part of the complete amalgamation of her and Wilson and they’re on the same path. She’s serving him, obviously, and we realize that all along she was serving him. Even though their paths were apart and it seemed like she might have been doing her own thing, she actually didn’t and she kept going on the same sort of narrative that completes him. It’s ultimately a really strong love story, which is always interesting to me because the antagonists are the people with the strongest love affair. It’s this delicious juxtaposition of menace and love.” 

Zurer admits that when she first found about Vanessa’s arc this season, there were a lot of mixed emotions. Showrunner Dario Scardapane and executive producer Sana Amanat knew that Vanessa’s death would spark the rage in Kingpin that was needed to propel the future of the story and while the departure is a sad one, “it’s beautifully done.” 

“In the second season, there’s a new threat coming into the picture and I think Vanessa is feeling it but the internal threat that she is feeling is not enough,” says Zurer. “[Kingpin] is enough for her but she’s not enough. He always wants more, he’s always hungry and always needs to fill another hole within himself to conquer more, get more control, to expand his dream and she starts to realize that it’s not quite sitting well. There is this real sensation that there is danger and that the level of danger is really spiking. But it’s all beautifully done because Dario wrote it in a way where it’s very internal.”

She continues: “I’ll always find her fascinating. I wish had even more to investigate with her but even though this is very much a comic book show with action, it’s the depth of the show that has always been so interesting to me. There has always been an attempt to talk about something deeper and that comes from the writers because they create really interesting juxtapositions for the story and for the characters.”

Zurer began her career in Israeli cinema and TV in the early ’90s where she won an Israel Film Academy Award for her role in Nina’s Tragedies and an Israeli Television Academy Award for her role in In Therapy. She was also nominated for her work in Shtisel. Her transition to Hollywood happened after casting director Nina Gold saw Zurer’s performance in 2004 film Something Sweet, which ultimately led to Gold casting her in Steven Spielberg’s Munich in 2005. Zurer went on to take roles in Angels & Demons with Tom Hanks and Man of Steel, the latter in which she played Superman’s biological mother. 

More recently, she has returned as Queen Achinoam in a second season of Amazon MGM Studios’ hit biblical drama House of David. The series, which drew 22 million viewers in the first 17 days after its Season 1 launch, hails from Wonder Project’s Jon Erwin (Jesus Revolution) and Jon Gunn (Ordinary Angels) and tells the story of the ascent of the biblical figure David (Michael Iskander), who eventually becomes the most renowned and celebrated king of Israel. 

The series follows the once-mighty King Saul as he falls victim to his own pride. At the direction of God, the prophet Samuel anoints an unlikely outcast teenager as the new king. As Saul loses his power over his kingdom, David finds himself on a journey to discover and fulfil his destiny. Zurer’s Queen Achinoam is wife to King Saul and not much is known of her in the original text, but the series presents her as a politically aware and emotionally complex royal figure, navigating life within Saul’s court during a turbulent period in Israel’s history.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a historical biographical series because these kinds of stories can easily go wrong,” she admits. “The retelling of the Bible can go really wrong, particularly when it comes to developing characters. But I met with the creators, and we talked about women at the time and how they didn’t have that much agency. Women were not allowed to own land, let alone have the ability to change or affect stories and I wasn’t interesting in taking part in a story where women were just tools of the story. I wanted them to have a real agenda.” 

She then started listening to podcasts about historians talking about the Bible and began to realize that women at the time actually “did have a lot of power.” 

“It was not always out in the front so much, but definitely behind the scenes,” she says. “I found some intriguing things about witchcraft at the time and the perception of it and the perception of women and their roles in those days and they overcame their limitations. That’s what really interested me.”  

House of David ultimately has become one of Zurer’s “favorite jobs” to date. Both series shot in Greece, and she says she found the entire process “incredibly collaborative” and fun. 

Zurer says she was adamant that she didn’t want to make Achinoam into “a wicked queen” and wanted her to have a “very grounding reason to do everything she does.” 

“I found faith for her was a really big thing, so I leaned on that,” she says. “When the rug is pulled from underneath her feel and she has to protect herself, she’s scared of losing her identity. So, by protecting the King and the Kingdom, she is protecting her identity. Some people will see her as just the bad Queen, but I don’t see it that way. She’s a very real woman in that time that would do anything to protect her family and that’s what she does, and I really fought for that.” 

When it comes to choosing her roles, Zurer says that in addition to connecting with the character and the production team, she also thinks a lot about her audience. “I really feel like being an actor is a spiritual thing and you are serving a creation of some sort of subconscious and adding to the subconscious mind and maybe the conscious mind as well. So, I fell a little bit of responsibility in that space. 

“You’ve got to do that because when you are a working actor, you are the luckiest person on Earth because you get to be in places of work with a lot of really talented and interesting people, travel the world and make money while doing your job. So, I’m very conscious of that and because of what it gives me, I feel like I have to be responsible of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.” 

At present Zurer is dipping her toe in the writing space and has three projects in development. While they are still too early to discuss, she does reveal that one is a film about a family that touches on the subject of autism, another is a show that she is developing and she also has a graphic novel in development. Zurer has previously illustrated two adult books, Shorts and Badolina by Gabi Nitzan. 

“I have been writing and developing things for the screen for more than 10 years now,” she says. “I know how hard it is and I have such a tremendous respect for writers now. It’s so hard to finish writing something and then bring it to someone else to read.”