Charlie Cox addresses that Daredevil fan theory after Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer

Spider-Man: No Way Home is bringing together Marvel characters that don't even belong in the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Disney's Avengers, but the film still won't be returning the Defenders of Hell's Kitchen.

Daredevil actor Charlie Cox recently addressed a long-gestating fan theory going around that bet on a return of the star's Man Without Fear. The talk started making the rounds again after viewers of the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer could've sworn they saw Cox's forearms in one particular scene.

The trailer showed Tom Holland's Peter Parker, who was just outed as Spider-Man and framed for the death of Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Spider-Man: Far From Home, being interrogated by authorities. One man with a white shirt and black tie, whose face was not shown in the frame, was seen slamming files of evidence down on the table.

Some fans suggested this could be Cox's Matt Murdock, who's a prominent New York City lawyer in the Marvel-verse that moonlights as the masked vigilante known as Daredevil. But, according to Cox, no those are not his forearms.

"I can promise you those are not my forearms," Cox told ComicBook.com in an interview.

Cox headlined Daredevil, which streamed on Netflix starting in 2015 alongside interconnected shows Jessica Jones (starring Krysten Ritter), Luke Cage (starring Mike Colter), Iron Fist (starring Finn Jones), and The Punisher (starring Jon Bernthal). These series, including the Avengers-style miniseries The Defenders, were meant as companions to the Marvel Studios movies and existed in the same world.

However, the shows were all scrapped unceremoniously after Marvel Television, which had been developing other programs like The Gifted and Legion for 20th Century Fox TV, folded into Disney's Marvel Studios banner in 2019. After that, Marvel started developing their own live-action series (see WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki), and it was like what came before had never happened.

Fans have held out hope that maybe Marvel would repurpose some of the actors from Netflix's shows, but so far that hasn't happened.

"As a fan of the Marvel movies, I've loved the little stuff where they pop up here and there but because we were on Netflix, we weren't able to do as much for legal reasons, I don't know why," Cox said last year. "But I love the idea of Jessica and Matt showing up in the background or Matt as a lawyer advising Peter Parker. That'd be really, really cool."

As for Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film will see Peter asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell that makes everyone in the world forget that he's the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. The plan goes awry and the sorcerer inadvertently brings figures from other dimensions into their own reality, including Alfred Molina's Doc Ock, who featured prominently in director Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, a film not associated with Disney's Marvel Studios.

Other figures teased in the trailer include Electro, Green Goblin, and the Lizard.

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