This was 2014, and Cox, like so many guys in their early thirties, was struggling with the gap between the life he’d once imagined and the more modest path he now found himself stumbling along. “My career had been chugging along OK. I had this quite big moment early on where I’d been the lead of a film, Stardust, and then the years after that had been barren,” Cox says. “Then there had been a rebuilding, and that had been a very humbling experience.”

2007’s Stardust had seemed like the dream gig for a young actor: playing the romantic lead in a big-budget fantasy adaptation, alongside a legend-filled cast that included Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, and Peter O’Toole. Today Matthew Vaughn’s film, with its earnestly camp Princess Bride energy has a cult fandom, particularly in Britain. But it received mixed reviews, underperformed at the US box office, and for Cox, work dried up overnight.

“There would be months,” Cox says, when he wouldn’t work. Back then he was living in Los Angeles, spending most of his days hanging around with a group of fellow out-of-work actors that included a young Andrew Garfield, Eddie Redmayne, Jamie Dornan, and Robert Pattinson. Often the five friends found they were auditioning – and being rejected – for the same roles. “I remember me and a couple of my friends who were out of work used to use the expression ‘we can’t get arrested right now.’”

Under the terms of his US visa, Cox says, he wasn’t allowed to wait tables or serve coffee like other unemployed actors. “I couldn’t make any money, at all. I couldn’t pay rent,” Cox says. As his friends went on to win Oscars and front billion-dollar franchises, Cox flitted from job to job, including a recurring role in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, but eventually moved back to London, deflated, when a friend recommended the book. “It can sound probably quite trite, but I guess most people at a certain age start to question a bit more: what’s the point of all this? What’s of value to me? What should be of value to me?” Cox says. “You know, what kind of man do I want to grow into?”

For most of his life, Cox has been “a real people pleaser, approval seeker”. A stereotypical boarding school kid: polite, upbeat, never wanting to rock the boat. (He has, in life as on screen, a loveable, Golden Retriever energy.) Part of wanting to go on the retreat was, Cox says, “unlearning [that]. To become someone, ultimately, who is more authentic and less concerned with what other people think – more concerned about how I feel, about how I behave.”

Shortly before travelling to Scotland, Cox had auditioned for a role in a new Netflix adaptation of Marvel’s Daredevil. Despite being an unlikely choice to play the crimefighting lawyer Matt Murdock (in the comics, Murdock is tall, redheaded, and – embarrassingly for Cox, who didn’t realise this at first – blind) the producers liked him, and that Friday night, in the hills outside Inverness, he got a call from his agent. “I heard them say, ‘we need you to come to Los Angeles to test.’” But, this being the Highlands, the line cut out. “I had a choice,” Cox says. “I could go back to the city and try and make a call, or call him Monday.” He was desperate, but he’d also committed to the retreat, so Cox stayed, and spent two days among strangers who had also felt the pull to examine, and perhaps try to alter, something fundamental in their lives.

When he finally got a signal again that Sunday night, Cox had five new voicemail messages. The producers liked him – but for Foggy Nelson, Murdock’s best friend. “And for whatever reason, having had this kind of empowering experience, I said, ‘I will come, but I’m only reading for Matt. I’m only reading for the lead,’” Cox says.

Cox isn’t naive: he knows it wasn’t just the retreat that eventually landed him Daredevil, a job that would come to change his life. There were countless other factors – not least his performance in the auditions and eventual screen tests. But he still wonders if the boost in self-confidence had something to do with it. After all, sometimes it’s hard for others to see something in you until you can see it in yourself.

T-shirt, trousers and shoes by Brunello Cucinelli.

Eleven years have passed since that trip, and Cox is once again in the familiar position of preparing to play Daredevil. In March, Disney will release Daredevil: Born Again, the franchise’s long-awaited sort-of-reboot (it’s complicated). Although the release is a few months away when we meet, Cox is already preparing to shoot the second season, which explains why he’s in superhero mode when he slips into Mayfair’s Mount St Restaurant on this particularly sleepy betwixtmas day in December, all bulging biceps, rugged scruff, and eyes shining despite stepping off a red-eye from Australia only a few hours ago.

Born Again has had a long and convoluted gestation. In 2018 Netflix cancelled Daredevil after three hit seasons and a run of MCU-lite spinoffs that culminated in 2017’s The Defenders. Cox was staying with a friend in London when he first heard. “I got a call late at night, and my boss at Marvel television at the time said, ‘they’ve pulled all the shows. All five of them,’” Cox recalls. “There was some… I don’t know, it was a conversation about the politics behind it all, some feud between Netflix and Disney. My bosses at Netflix and Marvel all called and were very nice, and very polite, but it was done.”

In the months after its cancellation, Cox travelled, and booked a role in a West End play – Betrayal, opposite Tom Hiddleston and Zawe Ashton, which ran for about three months in London and another four on Broadway – while experiencing, for the second time in his life, the grief-like process that one goes through when the path you thought your life was on suddenly falls away.

Daredevil had been more than a job. Cox met his wife, the producer Samantha Thomas, while they were working together on the first season; they now have two children. Many of the cast became close friends. And Cox himself had grown fiercely protective of Murdock, as fans had grown protective of him. His co-star Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays Wilson Fisk, insisted that the cancellation was temporary. (According to Variety, under the terms of the Netflix deal, Marvel and Disney were prohibited from using the characters for two years.) “He’d always say, ‘Oh, they’ll bring us back,” Cox says. “And I used to say to my wife, ‘He’s delusional. He’s got to move on.’”

One day, Marvel chief Kevin Feige (who, as then-head of Marvel Studios, has said that he was not involved with TV projects) came to see Betrayal in New York. “I went to shake his hand, and he was nice and enjoyed the play, but never mentioned Daredevil, never mentioned me,” Cox says. “I thought maybe he’d at least say, ‘Oh, I liked the show,’ but he didn’t say that.”

So when Feige called him, he says, one day during that eerie pandemic summer of 2020, Cox had zero expectations. “I thought it was maybe going to be a charity thing. Like, ‘Can we all get together and do some video,’” Cox says. “And then he said, ‘are you interested in coming back?”

Though he wasn’t clear what he was signing up to (“they said, ‘it’s going to be something in Spider-Man, probably a cameo in She-Hulk, and then we’ll see”), Cox agreed. Even then, with the pandemic and various creative reshuffles at Marvel, Born Again didn’t start filming until early 2023.

Suit by Dolce & Gabbana. Shirt by Brunello Cucinelli.

The new series was initially conceived as a clean break from the Netflix original, which, with its violent and more adult tone (exemplified by Cox’s simmering, guilt-wracked performance) stands out even now from Marvel’s typically CGI-heavy fare. “The thinking was, Well, we don’t want to do the same thing. We’ve done that,” Cox says. Although Cox and D’Onofrio both agreed to return, it was reported that the showrunners initially recast several other characters, drawing mixed reactions from fans. Cox, for his part, says that he started to have doubts early in production. “Vincent and I were both not 100 per cent convinced what we were doing at the time was the right path, but we’re both good soldiers and professionals, and we were trying to be open-minded.”

In May 2023, with six episodes already largely shot, the Writers Guild Of America went on strike, halting production on the show. “The writers’ strike happened, then the actors’ strike, which gave the producers an opportunity to look at our episodes and decide that it wasn’t quite working,” Cox says. Once again, he got an ominous call from Marvel – this time to say that he wouldn’t be going back to work as planned.

But rather than cancel the project, Marvel’s bosses replaced Born Again’s showrunners, Matt Corman and Chris Ord, with Dario Scardapane, who had worked on Netflix’s The Punisher. Scardapane, Cox says, reworked the series, adding three entirely new episodes, and wrote additional scenes to reconnect the previously-shot material into one, coherent whole. The new showrunners also rehired much of the original cast and crew, including Deborah Ann Woll (Karen Page), Elden Henson (Foggy Nelson), and Phil Silvera, the stunt coordinator behind the original’s famously brutal action sequences. “We made it known that we were not happy, and the big bosses, especially Kevin [Feige], listened to us,” D’Onofrio told me. The result, Cox says, “feels much more in keeping with the kind of stuff we did at Netflix.”

Cox is quick to say that he bears no ill will towards the initial creative team on Born Again, but “in a bizarre twist of fate, the strikes that were so terrible for so many people in the industry ended up being the best thing that happened for our particular show.”

The last few years have been a harsh comedown for comic book franchises. In July, after a run of flops and casting controversies, Marvel announced that it was overhauling its forthcoming projects, bringing back the Russo brothers to direct the next two Avengers films, and – in an even bigger bombshell – recasting Robert Downey Jr as comics villain Dr Doom. Given that Cox has already cameoed in Spider-Man: No Way Home, fans are speculating as to whether Daredevil will make an appearance.

“I think it’s more possible than it’s ever been, yeah,” Cox says. “I would love to be in one of the Avengers films, or another Spider-Man, or something like that. For a couple of reasons. One, because over the years I have become a geeky fan of the character, and I weirdly, for the character’s sake, feel like it’d be really cool for him to get that kind of upgrade.”

The second reason is smaller, more personal: “I would also just love it in terms of what it would do for my chances of getting other movie roles.”

Suit by Officine Générale. Vest by Cos. Shoes by Vinny’s.

That is the strange thing about Charlie Cox’s career: even now, after years of playing a beloved character in a major superhero franchise, even after Boardwalk, and Stardust’s cultural reappraisal, he still feels overlooked – as if the shadow that has hung over him since his breakout role never really dissipated.

“I’m often on set, and like a producer will say to me, ‘You know, we couldn’t cast this role, and then someone said, What about Charlie? And we went, ‘that’s an idea!’” Cox says. “And I’ve heard that enough times to think, why am I not on the original list?”

Over the years, Cox has chewed over that question. Early on, he grew frustrated that casting directors didn’t give constructive feedback as to why they were going another way, even when he asked his agent. “So I ended up saying to her, ‘if you ever get feedback you think will be helpful to me, something I can work on, give it to me. Otherwise, I’m not going to ask.” She did this, he says, only once. “She called up and said, ‘they said your American accent isn’t good enough.’” He was filming Boardwalk Empire at the time, and so on his off days, he found the best dialect coach in the business, a man named Tim Monich. “He works a lot with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was in New York filming Wolf Of Wall Street at the time.” It turned out Monich was staying a short walk from Cox’s apartment. “So I went to see him twice a week for three or four months. And the next job I got was Daredevil.”

Despite being a hit with fans, big Hollywood roles have largely eluded him (though he reportedly got close to playing Han Solo), and he’s has never been inundated with offers like some of his peers. “I’ve always had to fight for everything,” Cox says, “I’ve always had to convince people.”

Cox isn’t on social media – a stance that once seemed old-fashioned, and now feels like foresight. He will skim-read reviews to get a sense of how a project has been received, while trying to avoid reading too much about his own performance. (He recalls someone sending him the Guardian’s review of his Netflix series Treason. “The headline was upsetting enough. It was something like ‘MI6’s cuddliest spy.’”)

“To be honest about my feelings, I feel really inadequate about my ability,” Cox says. “I feel like I hit a fucking low ceiling, do you know what I mean? And I’ve been doing it for such a long time that I guess that plays into my suspicions [about] why maybe I haven’t ever crossed over into that next level with some of my friends.”

It’s not that Cox is interested in that level of fame. “I never thought I wanted that, and I don’t think I’d handle that well,” he says. He remembers how Tom Hiddleston was unable to walk through Times Square during Betrayal’s Broadway run because of the risk of being mobbed. “I’ve seen enough of it to realise how intrusive it is, how frustrating it can be. You’re not allowed a bad day,” Cox says. “But I would like the byproduct of it, which is more varied opportunities.”

Suit and T-shirt by Officine Générale. Shoes by Vinny’s.

In the years between Daredevil jobs, Cox built up a respectable body of work, between theatre, films and TV. And he’s had personal wins; in 2021 he partnered with his wife again in the BBC gangster drama Kin, for which the family spent several blissful months in Dublin. “It was fun to discover how it wasn’t just that we were falling in love [on Daredevil], that we were so creatively on the same page.”

Lately, Cox’s career has taken a welcome turn back into comedy. He’s about to star in a romcom, Merv, opposite Zooey Deschanel. “That was really fun, and very different,” he says. (“I’m sure he’ll be doing a lot more comedy after people see him in this film,” Deschanel told me.) He’ll also be in Adults, from the producers of Portlandia and Atlanta. “I came in and just did a fun, three- episode thing,” he says, but he relished being among comic actors, and flexing a different creative muscle. “I was like, ‘wow, it’s really fun to be that uncomfortable.’”

He still hopes to do more movies. “I’d like to have an opportunity to work with a couple of really great film directors,” he says. (Like who? “The Coen brothers, my absolute favourites of all time. Wes Anderson. David O Russell. Obviously [David] Fincher.”)

But the truth is? He’s happy. Well adjusted. You might even say that Cox has it all together. During the pandemic, he started a weekly Zoom meeting – a sort of online version of that men’s retreat. These days, more than a dozen guys take part. “We get on once a week, and talk about our feelings,” Cox says. The structured chats (“so we can communicate without it becoming banter”) have become a space to talk about stresses and anxieties, “thoughts or feelings that maybe aren’t conducive to a dinner party.” If that doesn’t sound healthy, I don’t know what is.

Sure, maybe this isn’t the path he expected; maybe he sometimes envies the routes others have taken. But when he isn’t talking to journalists, Cox says, “honestly, the truth is I don’t actually spend much time thinking about it.”

And this path has its upsides. Not being on location all the time means he can be a hands-on dad. He and his wife recently celebrated 10 years together. In January, he became a US citizen. He doesn’t get hounded by paparazzi; on the rare occasion that a fan stops him, he’s more than happy to take a picture. Maybe that’ll change – who can see, really, where our path will take us? And if not: “I have a beautiful life.”

Jacket, trousers, shirt and tie by Brioni.

Styling by Grant Woolhead
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Production by Tristan Rodriguez
With thanks to the Fraunces Tavern, New York.