When it came to Dex, his story is also the origin story of Bullseye, and Oleson said his approach was to “have a more psychologically-whole profile” for the character, explaining, “We looked at all of the comics and there were different versions of him. Generally-speaking, in television or in a filmed medium madmen don’t play that well. Like people [who] are just nuts. There’s not a lot of depth to somebody who is that crazy and just taunting people, and a killer. I was interested, as was Marvel, in getting into what made him that way. Telling the origin story. First of all, I think origin stories are just awesome. You finally get to go under the hood of the car and figure out what it is that makes it run. What Wilson Bethel brought to the role also was the ability to play multiple layers to the character. I wanted to give him red meat to play. We all looked at that and said, this is a fascinating character from the comics, he is one of the major villains of Daredevil.”

Oleson added, “Also, when I was looking at that character, there was another layer to him that I wanted to add. It was speaking to kind of a larger world. I thought that there are people right now who could go into light or could go into darkness. People who may have been drawn into evil by people who have that effect and appeal to fear and to hatred, and psychologically manipulate people into the darkness. I wanted kind of a borderline personality. What we took then, and we spoke to psychologists and psychiatrists and we did research, we defined Dex as having this Borderline Personality Disorder where he could have become a functional member of society. He was an FBI sniper. He was trying to help people. He was on the right side of the law. Enter: Wilson Fisk.”

Oleson described Fisk as, “This moral black hole who pulls everyone into darkness who are in his orbit. He is the one responsible for pulling a character who is on the border of good and evil into the darkness. That was another element of the hidden architecture of the show: What happens when you have these toxic tyrant personalities come in? What happens to people who are on the border, like Dex? What happens to good men like Ray Nadeem, the FBI agent who is Wilson Fisk’s handler, played brilliantly by Jay Ali. Here’s a good man who is afraid of failing his family, not living up to the expectations of his son and his wife. That is something that Wilson Fisk plays upon and draws him also into the abyss.”