Deborah Ann Woll Officially Reveals How She Changed Karen Page's Darkest 'Daredevil' Story [Exclusive]

Deborah Ann Woll has taken on a wide variety of roles in her career, from her breakout turn in HBO's vampire drama True Blood to her more recent presence in gaming as Kratos' wife Faye in the modern God of War saga. The latter is even about to give her a starring role with the upcoming spin-off, God of War Laufey, set to arrive on PlayStation 5 in February. However, there's no character she's more synonymous with than the MCU incarnation of Karen Page from Daredevil. One of Matt Murdock's closest allies, love interests, and partners, she's been an integral part of the Man Without Fear's story, from the original three-season run of the Netflix series to the follow-up, Born Again on Disney+, which is preparing for Season 3.

With her proximity to Daredevil, Karen has been put through the wringer over the years. She's faced murder charges, been a target of Bullseye, witnessed the death of one of her dearest friends, Foggy Nelson, and nearly landed in prison until Matt revealed his identity to bring down the Kingpin. Yet, the darkest moments that shaped who Karen was when she entered Matt's life were partly Woll's design. In an interview with Collider's Perri Nemiroff for her new film, The Cycle, at Fantastic Fest, she revealed how finally getting to dig into Karen's past marked one of the first times in her career that she helped shape the course of one of her characters creatively.

"Generally, I'm not looking to change something unless I know that this is going to be a really exciting new addition," she said when asked about the first time she was able to speak up and change something on-set. "I'm not looking to sort of willy-nilly... I do a lot of homework before I even come forward with something. Because sometimes, the things that feel the most challenging, if you can make them work, are actually really interesting." In Daredevil, however, she felt how important it was to stick the landing with Page's backstory because of how heavily it had been built up throughout the series. Her questioning of the showrunners about their view of the character finally paid off in Season 3 when Erik Oleson took the reins and delivered the episode, "Karen," that delved into her emotional familial past.

"But in Daredevil, Karen Page has this deep, dark past, and we keep alluding to it throughout the first two seasons. We had three different showrunners for all three of those seasons, and they all had a different idea about what the past was. So whenever I would meet with the showrunner, I was like, 'So what's your take on what her history is?' Obviously, I had mine. Finally, in Season 3, Erik Oleson decided to do an episode about it, and I will forever be grateful to him, because in the middle of his superhero show, he took the whole crew upstate and we did a little family drama, and I can't believe that he respected me and the character enough to give it that time. I'm really floored by that and will forever be grateful."

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which MCU Character Is Your Best Friend? Steve Rogers · Tony Stark · Peter Parker · Shuri

Pick where you meet, what they text you at two in the morning, what they hand you on your birthday and what the two of you keep arguing about. Four very different people are waiting on the other side: the one who never leaves, the one who is exhausting and worth it, the one who replies in four seconds flat, and the one who will roast you and then fix your life.

🛡️Steve Rogers(Captain America)

🛠️Tony Stark(Iron Man)

🕸️Peter Parker(Spider-Man)

🐆Shuri(Black Panther)

FIND YOUR FRIEND →

01

Where do the two of you meet? Nobody in this universe makes a friend somewhere normal.

AIn a gym at six in the morning, where the two of you are the only people awake. BAt a party you were not really invited to, where they talked to you for an hour. CQueuing for coffee in Queens while something loud happens six blocks away. DIn a lab you had no clearance for, and they decided to let you stay.

NEXT QUESTION →

02

Your phone lights up at two in the morning. What does it say? You find out what kind of friend somebody is by what they send at that hour.

ANothing at all, because they are already outside, having heard you had a rough week. BFour hundred words about an idea they just had, plus a schematic you cannot read. CAn apology for texting so late, followed by a question that could have waited. DA meme aimed directly at you, sent with no context and absolutely no mercy.

NEXT QUESTION →

03

It is your birthday. What do they hand you? The present is never really about the present.

ASomething small they made themselves, handed over slightly awkwardly. BSomething absurd and expensive that fixes a problem you mentioned once, months ago. CA gift that clearly took months of saving, wrapped badly, with a long note inside. DAn upgrade to something you already owned, installed without asking you first.

NEXT QUESTION →

04

What does a good Saturday with them actually look like? Superheroes have days off, and this is how they spend them.

AA long walk, an old diner and a conversation you had both been avoiding. BWhatever they decide at noon, which somehow ends with you in another country. CBad takeaway and an old film on their couch, interrupted about eleven times. DTwo hours in a workshop, arguing about whether your idea would even work.

NEXT QUESTION →

05

You have your worst day in years. What do they do about it? This is the part of a friendship nobody puts in the trailer.

AThey sit next to you and say almost nothing until you are ready to talk. BThey throw money, noise and three terrible plans at it until one of them helps. CThey turn up with food, refuse to leave, and then check on you every day for a month. DThey tell you the honest version of it, which nobody else was willing to say.

NEXT QUESTION →

06

Every real friendship has one fight it keeps having. What is yours? The thing you argue about is usually the thing you like most about them.

AThey take risks with their own life that they would never let me take with mine. BThey vanish into work for weeks and expect me to be completely fine about it. CThey keep apologising for things that were never even slightly their fault. DThey are three steps ahead of me and do not always bother explaining why.

NEXT QUESTION →

07

The alarm goes off and you are both in the field. What is your job? You get one role on the team, and it says a lot about who you want next to you.

AHolding the front line so that everybody behind me gets out of the building. BDoing the thing nobody has a plan for yet, at speed, and inventing the rest. CGetting people off the street quietly before anyone realises we were there. DRunning everything from a screen and talking the rest of them through it.

NEXT QUESTION →

08

Ten years on, what do you want this friendship to be? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who picks up the phone.

AExactly the same, because some people are simply permanent and that is the appeal. BLoud and complicated and worth every bit of the trouble it caused along the way. CStill the person I look out for, and still the first one who checks on me. DTwo people who keep each other sharp and never once get sentimental about it.

REVEAL MY BEST FRIEND →

The Line Is Ringing Your Best Friend Is…

Four people, four completely different ideas of what it means to have somebody in your corner. Here is who picked up, what they would ask of you, and what you would get back.

Steve Rogers

You want the friend who does not leave. Steve is the one who turns up at the door without being asked, who remembers what you said you were worried about, and who has never once made you audition for his attention.

• His entire character is built on a single sentence, which is that he will not abandon somebody just because it has become expensive to keep them.
• He is far funnier than people give him credit for, and the joke is almost always at his own expense rather than yours.
• The friendship comes with a cost, since being close to Steve means being dragged into fights that were never yours and being glad about it later.
• You would get a friend who tells you the hard thing to your face and then defends you to everybody else in the room.

Tony Stark

You want the friend who is genuinely exhausting and completely worth it. Tony will forget your birthday, then build you something at four in the morning that you did not know you needed, and hand it over as though it were nothing.

• He is bad at saying the warm thing out loud, so he says it in hardware instead, which is why everybody around him ends up with upgraded everything.
• Being his friend means putting up with the disappearing, the deflecting and the jokes that arrive about ninety seconds too early.
• What you get in return is somebody who will spend an unreasonable amount of money and effort on a problem the moment it becomes yours.
• He is the loudest person in the room and the one most likely to be quietly panicking about all of you.

Peter Parker

You want the friend who replies in four seconds and apologises for it. Peter is earnest in a way that is almost unfashionable, and he will take on far more than he can carry rather than admit that he is struggling.

• He is the only one on this list who needs looking after as much as he looks after you, and that balance is exactly what makes it a real friendship.
• Nobody in the MCU is better at the small stuff, from remembering the thing you were nervous about to showing up with food you did not ask for.
• Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrived in July 2026 and put him back where he works best, which is broke, local and carrying the weight on his own.
• You would get a friend who is sincerely, embarrassingly happy for you when something goes right, with no edge to it at all.

Shuri

You want the friend who insults your shoes, fixes your phone and then quietly rearranges your entire life for the better. Shuri does not do soft reassurance, and that is the reason you would believe her when she says you are fine.

• She is the smartest person in almost any room she walks into and treats that as a reason to tease you rather than a reason to lecture you.
• The teasing is the affection. When Shuri stops making fun of you, something has gone seriously wrong and you should probably ask her about it.
• Her story is the one on this list that goes somewhere genuinely dark, which is what turned her from a scene stealer into the emotional centre of the films.
• You would get a friend who never pities you, never softens the truth, and never once lets you take yourself too seriously.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'Daredevil' Gave Karen the Backstory Deborah Ann Woll Wanted

While the episode happening at all was quite the payoff, Woll also appreciated how much input she was given on its direction, given how long she'd been with the show and how strongly she felt about where Karen's story should go. To her, the flashback needed to hit especially hard to explain why the Nelson and Murdock partner is so haunted by what happened. That started and ended with the fatal car crash that killed her brother and forced her to leave town at her father's behest. Woll recalled how the original plans involved Karen's boyfriend pursuing her, which she feared would effectively give the character an out for the tragedy. To make the pain all the more real, she wanted the accident to be the result of Karen's actions, making it a mistake she has no choice but to live with.

"But in that, because we had done a lot of talking about what this story was and why she would be so haunted by it for so long, and in the first draft that they wrote and came to me — because it's the death of her brother, spoilers, and it's her fault; she feels it's her fault — and in it, they had the boyfriend chasing us in the car, and that's what caused the crash. And I said to him, I was like, 'I just think there's too much room for her to say it's not her fault in that.' I was like, 'Is it okay if he doesn't follow us and I crash the car because I'm drunk and high and angry? There's no one else to point the blame to.' Like, 'Can we make this truly devastating?' Because I told them in the beginning, 'I don't want the deep, dark secret to be that I killed a guy to save a school bus of children, right?' That just doesn't actually pack the punch, and that happens in TV a lot. I wanted it to really be something that she could never forgive herself for. And he did it, which was great. He agreed, and that's what we put on camera."

It's fitting that Woll discussed the family drama of Karen Page following the Fantastic Fest premiere of The Cycle, which again has her navigating a complicated father-daughter relationship, albeit in a more gruesome manner. She leads the horror film as Dr. Meg Garland, an expert on all things death and decay who is brought in by police to help solve a baffling mystery. The body of her estranged father has been found in a nightmarish crime scene after he's been missing for 36 years. To get answers, she's forced to unravel his dark past, uncovering another part of his life that she never knew and reckoning with their past. Jordan Downey wrote and directed the film, with help on the script from Kevin Stewart and a cast including Jeffrey Donovan, Will Hochman, Jack Doolan, Carl W. Crudup, Jeb Berrier, Gretchen Corbett, and David Myers Gregory. So far, the film already has one big fan in horror legend Stephen King, who glowingly recommended it, saying, "I don't usually pump up horror movies (unless they are mine, haha), but this is special."

Woll will return as Karen Page in Daredevil: Born Again Season 3 next year. In the meantime, The Cycle is set to debut on Shudder on October 23. Stay tuned here at Collider for more coverage from throughout the rest of Fantastic Fest.