The Punisher was an unexpected addition to Marvel and Netflix's superhero roster, which was initially designed to spotlight Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist, before bringing the "street-level" heroes together for The Defenders.

But the gun-toting antihero made such a splash in Season 2 of Daredevil, thanks to Jon Bernthal's layered performance, it seemed like a no-brainer to spin Frank Castle off into his own series, which was recently renewed for Season 2.

Mashable spoke to showrunner Steve Lightfoot — who previously worked on Hannibal and Narcos — about bringing Marvel's darkest hero to the small screen for Netflix.

There are a lot of different ways that you could have gone with The Punisher, given all the different iterations of the character, but I love that first and foremost, it's a story about veterans and the way the country fails them. What drew you in that direction in particular?

The baseline thing for me was, obviously, Frank is a veteran... The event that makes him the Punisher happens at home, but I thought it was just very hard to tell Frank Castle's story and not have the show in some way be about [the fact that] we've been sending men to war for sixteen years now and that they come back profoundly changed.

And that beyond the politics of whether you should be there or shouldn't be there, the very fact of sending men to war — which has been going on as long as history has been there — changes them profoundly. And I think actually in truth, we're probably more aware of it and trying to do more for them now than we ever have before, but it's a huge issue. I just felt like once we got into starting to work out the show, we needed to be cognizant of that.

How did you approach breaking the season? What were the main pillars you wanted to hang the show on?

What was great was when I first came in to talk to Marvel they let me see Daredevil Season 2 ahead of it being launched, and when I came in I didn't realize they'd done that show, or that Jon had already played the part. So initially I just got to see Jon playing him, and I just thought he had such physicality — he scared the hell out of me, but was so human and empathetic — and I was like "that's a guy you can build a show around."

And even within that, the sense of a guy who didn't want to get in touch with his emotions but actually was burying them under rage spoke to me, because look, pretty much all of us haven't been Special Forces soldiers who've been to war and killed a bunch of people — or even been veterans of any stripe — but I feel like we've all probably lost someone or grieved. That spoke to me, because I think to make good shows, you have to find something universal in them. You have to find something everyone can identify with. I also think men in particular are really bad at accessing the emotions that hurt and they will often either pretend they don't exist or they'll bury them in rage and then eventually something gives and they explode. Frank was sort of the ultimate metaphor for that.

So I started from that place with the character and then Daredevil Season 2 had two things in it. When he killed Colonel Schoonover, he said, "what happened to you is because of something you were doing in Kandahar, it's no accident that your family died."

And the second thing was we saw he had a disc with "Micro" written on it, and I just felt like having set those up, we needed to continue on from them. So the story started building out from that and then once you start telling the story, the show starts to become populated with characters and I'm just a big believer then of trying to make those characters as real as possible and sort of seeing where they take you. So everything was then told from the point of view of trying to be honest as possible about those characters.

Most superhero shows end with a cliffhanger to set up next season, but I love that you leave us on a more emotional cliffhanger instead. At what point did you know that was how you wanted to end it, with Frank actually being able to access those emotions and admit that he is scared?

It's interesting because I think in writing that episode, that scene was always there, but it wasn't always necessarily the last scene and a lot of it came to me actually when I was there on the day watching Jon do it. And Jon and I, even on the floor, were messing with the speech a little, and I just thought he'd had such an amazing sweet spot and when the camera hit him on that last frame of the show I just sat there at the monitor and I said, "that's the last frame of the show."

So it was something that, I'm not going to tell you what, there actually was meant to be a scene after that and I was like, we don't need it, that's where the show ends. Because... it's so vulnerable and because I think the journey for the show — he gets his revenge, but I felt unless he grew, unless he changed, it was as much for me about him growing to accept his own nature and if not forgive himself, at least accept his own part in what has happened to his family and allow himself to feel that.

So that scene for me in a way was the emotional redemption for Frank, knowing that the violence in his nature is still there — so when he says, "I haven't got a war to fight," knowing that it would take about 3 minutes to find him a new one. He's never going to be a guy who walks away from a fight.

Marvel's The Punisher

I'm fascinated by Frank and Micro's relationship — probably because of the reason you just touched on, that Frank is so repressed in that way. He spends a lot of this season mocking Micro, and that he drinks chamomile tea and that he's not a very physical guy. How do you think that relationship changes them both over the course of the season?

It's really interesting because I feel like that relationship in some ways is the heart of the show and it's almost a little bit the "Odd Couple." And I think it's also where the show gets a lot of its humor which it was important to me that it had. I think otherwise it would just be too much. I wanted it to have levity.

We used to talk a lot in the writers' room about them sort of being like two guys who've ended up living together because in some ways it's two divorced guys, both who want their wife back and I just thought there was something really poignant in ... Micro can still get what he wants back and Frank can't. Revenge on its own is a very cold pursuit. For me, the show became more about Frank wanting to give Micro back what Frank could never have, than revenge for its own sake. And through doing tha,t I think he found a way to access his own feelings about his family.

For all that, Micro is the really selfish one, even though Frank's the big physical one. I feel like Micro's journey was... he's very single-minded, he just wants Frank to get him what he wants. And he's using Frank, really, in a very selfish way. I feel like his journey was actually to grow to care about Frank and make a friend. I think there's this thing at the heart of the show which is all about the nature of male friendship as well.

On that note, we have to talk about the scene in episode 8 where Frank and Micro get drunk and start talking about sex and then Micro exposes himself to Frank. I've clearly seen too much Hannibal because now I'm looking for subtext everywhere, but I honestly was like, "are they going to make out right now?" But it is kind of an encapsulation of the weirdness of male friendship. What went into that scene in particular?

I think it was about finding a thing that was very real to men, again I think about finding universality so it's not always about a spy and a killer living in a basement. And I think what's interesting is, drunk guys when they're on their own will probably talk in a really maudlin way about their wives and the idea was always to come up with a very real, funny sort of scene where they were just like any other guys would be, couched in this slightly weird jealousy because Frank is now hanging out with Micro's wife. So there was just so much going on in there. And then frankly, when you've got actors like that, it's just a joy to give them a 5 page scene and have it not all be about the story or heavy emotion. I thought they both were so funny while always keeping it very real.

I think it's episode 6 — there's a much softer scene where they talk about Thanksgiving and their wives because the truth is, in the end, however you want to look at them, men are so often in the end defined by their relationships to the women in their lives. And I thought it was really interesting to have these two guys who had had that taken away you know? And so they just keep coming back to it.

Before the premiere, a lot of discussion around the show centered on "whether this is the right time for a gun-toting vigilante" given the state of America right now. But I was surprised by how measured you were in Frank's use of guns, so I was curious how you kind of navigated that balance and Frank's relationship to violence in particular?

Yeah I mean look, the way you put it, I think there's his relationship to violence which is pretty up close and personal, and then there's guns. And obviously guns are often what he uses but I was very keen... And here's the thing I should preface all of this with: I finished writing the show a year ago. We'd written the show a year ago and I think we've just hit, I mean I think there was another shooting yesterday [This interview was conducted the day after the Rancho Tehama shootings on Nov. 14]. I think we've hit this horrible stretch, but the truth is there'd probably just been one when I started writing the show. And my show hasn't been on air yet. So at that point the debate was probably about some other show.

And I think that's a bigger political question that doesn't relate to my show or necessarily television in general. So there were two things: One was, I feel like if you're going to show violence personally, you should also show the cost of it, both physically and emotionally. The far worse thing for me is when someone gets whacked around the head with a stick and there isn't a mark on them and they'll laugh and run around. And then secondly it was just a storytelling thing as well — you want every action scene to be different and tell a different story, so if you run around with a gun all the time, it would get incredibly repetitive.

So the choices in truth were borne of trying to find the best way to tell the story and I hope we did that. And I think to the guns of it all, the sad thing is that what was true when I was writing the show is still true now in terms of the state of things, and actually what we try to do in the show is show a bunch of viewpoints on that. I don't think we shied away from the debate but I also personally think drama's job is to ask questions, not to provide answers. If I come down on a side then I'm preaching. But I hope the show fosters debate. The one thing I would say is, Frank's doing what he's doing but in terms of our depiction, he's certainly not a happy guy. And I think the emotional cost of being around that violence is prevalent in the show and I think that's something we were very keen to make happen.

Marvel's The Punisher

Dinah Madani is an original character that you created for the series, so what did you want to accomplish with her that you perhaps couldn't have by adapting an existing Marvel character — especially in regards to making her Persian-American?

It was a bunch of things. Once the story had a Kandahar element, I felt like there should be some sort of character and element within the mix of the story that actually was from the Middle East or touched that region. And then secondly in the construction of the show, I wanted this character who was pursuing Frank from this official police end of things. And once I got into it, it was almost an element of going, "what are all the cliches both about people from the Middle East, cops, everything, and how can we throw them all out and turn them on their head?"

So it was like, let's make her a woman, let's make her Middle Eastern, let's make her parents Muslim but she's not. Let's make her actually a patriotic American. Let's make her kick-ass, and be forthright, make her a sexually sort of active person, take all those things that you wouldn't necessarily get, and do 'em all. And just come up with a character and organically — because these people exist — let's take someone who's none of the cliches and put the up on screen. And she just felt like a very relevant, contemporary character, I hope.

And the great thing about writing it was there's a bunch of women in the writers' room and it was great fun to let them sort of loose on her and kind of go "hey, what should she be? Alright, so the obvious version is this, what do we do instead?" And I think we just tried to make her surprising and then in that she became this great individual character. I hope.

I do appreciate that the show is a little bit more liberated about sex than some of the other Marvel properties. Was that something that you had to have discussions on?

No, not really, there weren't a great deal of discussions. I feel like my personal take on sex scenes is if you've got to do them and they don't feel real to character and the situation then I'd rather jump that scene.

I feel like coy sex scenes where everyone's making love with all their clothes still on... that's not real and it throws me out of a show. So I'm like, let's find a way to make it feel grown-up and mature in keeping with the rest of the show. That was my approach to it and people saw the episodes and liked the episodes and there was never any great discussion about it either way really.

Marvel's The Punisher

Billy Russo is a fairly major departure from his comic book origin, but still ends up in a similar place as Jigsaw. His relationship with Frank is really the driving force of the season, so how did you go about adapting him?

Again, he was kind of a broken guy before he went in, because he had the backstory of the care system. And I think in the end, he was driven by two things psychologically: one is if you have a guy who has never been loved, it's then very hard for them to ever believe they can be. And so in a way the only person who is ever going to love them is themselves, so there can be a selfishness in that.

And actually where he found love and real brotherhood was in the military, but maybe he was too far gone to really accept it for that. And I think it was almost too late he realizes he had it in Frank and he threw it away. And secondly I think with that complete lack of status and position, he was always going to be the little boy who had nothing who got stamped around. For me it was borne of this, "if I can just become successful or wealthy or powerful enough maybe I won't feel like that kid anymore."

And so I feel like that drove him, because in a way he made one bad choice which is he took the money to do the dirty deed, and then everything else spun out from that, and I think that was simply borne of a desire to have the means to finally be the person he always wished he was and couldn't be. And unfortunately in the end, that lost him the one great friend he'd ever had.

The Punisher is now streaming on Netflix.