Disney+Kingpin rips Gallo’s face apart in Daredevil: Born Again Episode 9, and it’s the MCU’s goriest, most brutal moment ever. This is how they did it.
Gallo and Fisk have been at odds since the start of the season. The commissioner refuses to believe Fisk has any intention of serving the city, but when he tried to resign and take most of the NYPD with him, the mayor blackmailed him with photos of his secret child.
At the start of the Daredevil finale, Fisk is furious after Bullseye’s attempt on his life. He wants to give his task force permission to hunt down Poindexter and every other vigilante without any due process or warrants, and he wants to lock down the city until he’s satisfied with their efforts.
It quickly becomes clear that Gallo is an obstacle and a liability. If Fisk wants to be New York’s true Kingpin, he needs to kill him – and the way he does it absolutely horrific.
Gallo’s death in Daredevil: Born Again was done with practical effects
Disney+In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Vincent D’Onofrio and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead broke down exactly how they pulled off Gallo’s gruesome demise.
To jog your memory, Fisk batters Gallo to his knees before squeezing his head to the point blood starts to trickle from his eyes, before yanking his jaw from his face and ripping the top of his head off. It is gnarly, and the “skull crush” was achieved on-camera by scanning the actor’s body and creating a lifelike mold.
“I remember talking to the special effects and makeup effects departments about how we were going to do it,“ Benson explained to the outlet.
“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.“
Brandon Grether, who worked on the show’s special makeup effects team, explained the scene in further detail. “Instead of a lifecast, we’ve recently transferred over to doing scans. So we have a portable scanner that’s very high definition,” he said.
“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.‘
“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.“
They then 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 added.
Why Gallo’s death was so brutal in Daredevil: Born Again
Disney+The original Daredevil show didn’t shy away from violence, but Gallo’s death is a whole other level not just for the series, but Marvel as a whole.
According to the directors, D’Onofrio was “obsessed” with the head crush. “I only say that half joking. He was really the team leader on this thing,” Benson recalled.
For D’Onofrio, it had to go beyond the usual skull-crushings you see in other movies. “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,” the star said.
“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.“
In the meantime, find out what we know about Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 and check out how its post-credits scene sets up Jon Bernthal’s Punisher special. You can also find out where Daredevil: Born Again sits on our ranking of every Marvel TV show.
