“I was like, ‘Dude, I’ve got the worst news,’” Scardapane said. “And he’s like, ‘I know exactly what you’re gonna say, and it’s the right choice.’ He felt in that moment that there’s no way he’s getting out of that apartment. It was funny because there were scenes shot of him after that moment, and it really feels like we’re telling the wrong story here. I think it’s a testament to how much we all love him, that we knew this character probably should not survive but we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.”
A gunshot was then added in post-production, sealing Blake’s fate. “The fact that, as actors, we didn’t know that was gonna happen makes the scene maybe even more compelling,” Froushan explained. “I love Michael Gandolfini like a brother. This season, the whole journey we have together is a movie. So I was gutted. I was really upset. But I think it raises the stakes of the story in a really exciting way that was maybe necessary for that storyline.”
Gandolfini told TV Insider that Blake’s death felt “freeing,” adding, “I love Daniel, but it’s so right. Where else is he gonna go? And he gets this little hero’s moment, and it just felt so great, I just felt so lucky. Again it’s hard, you’ve got Bullseye, Fisk, Karen Page, Matt Murdock, and including other like people from the comics, so sometimes, characters that don’t have superpowers don’t have the longest arcs, and they’re there to support the superheroes, which is great, but the fact that Daniel got to have this, I just felt so touched and that they trusted me… there’s only so much screen time that you get every episode, and so like the fact that they gave me a real journey to go on, I was very lucky.”
