Coming hot on the heels of this past weekend’s premiere of ‘The Defenders’ on Netflix, the online streaming giant has given us our first look at The Punisher in his “full” costume, as fans of the comic-book series are used to seeing him.
Jon Bernthal stepped in to play tortured serviceman Frank Castle in the second season of Netflix’s ‘Daredevil,’ to great acclaim and appreciation from fans. Like yours truly, fans who have lived through Marvel’s attempts to bring the character to life via three vastly different “okay but not great” films have become quickly enamored with the current presentation of the character – so much so that The Punisher is getting his own Netflix series, the first such series to come from the Marvel-Netflix relationship that was unplanned at the beginning of the process.
Take a peek at the image:
Not bad, eh? Personally, I did like the trench coat look we were given at the end of the second season of ‘Daredevil,’ but this is definitely more in line with Frank’s classic look in the comics. I could use the upper portion of the skull to be a bit more prominently colored white, as my eyes are first drawn to the white around the logo’s eyes on his flak jacket, making it slightly look like ol’ Punny is wearing a bra. Probably not the exact look Frank wants to go for.
Bernthal, for his part, spoke in a recent interview about the responsibilities he feels in bringing such a “dark” character to life:
“It’s an interesting predicament. To put [the Punisher] as the central character is interesting, I think that my big struggle with him is that one of my biggest kind of things that I’m always fighting for on set is, I always want to preserve the essence of Frank, and have the right and be bold enough to really turn my back on the audience, and not do things to win the audience’s favor, but rather stay true to the character and the essence of who he is. So I think that’s the real challenge: being bold enough to not make him too heroic, at least ‘heroic,’ is important to me. That being said, I think there’s Frank Castle inside of everybody, I think being a father and being a husband, he’s a character that I deeply empathize with.”
Fans won’t have to wait long to see more Punisher on screen, as he is the next series due up from Netflix; a specific release date has not yet been set, but we anticipate seeing the premiere sometime later this year.
