‘Hawkeye’ Reveals Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin Is the Show’s Villain

That sound you hear is the sound of a million doors to a million Marvel stories opening all at once because of the final seconds of this week’s episode of Hawkeye. We don’t have any time to waste with an intro paragraph, so let’s throw up a SPOILER ALERT for Hawkeye Episode 5, “Ronin,” and get moving!

You ready?

After a relatively short wait of two weeks, we have an answer to one of Hawkeye’s biggest mysteries: who is the big man pulling the strings on Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) and the Tracksuit Mafia? The answer is, of course, Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). If this reveal didn’t make you jump off your couch with excitement, then, well, you are not like me.

Before we get into what this all means, let’s break down what happened. At the end of Episode 5, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) gets a text message from Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the Black Widow assassin who has been hired to kill Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). It turns out that the person who hired Yelena was none other than Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga) — Kate’s own mother. And because “pics or it didn’t happen” is a thing, Yelena follows up that reveal with a blurry camera photo of Eleanor meeting with the big man himself: Kingpin.

The clues to this reveal were planted two weeks ago in Episode 3 during Maya Lopez’s origin sequence. In that flashback, we met Maya’s father and her father’s unseen employer, who was referred to as Maya’s “uncle.” All we saw of the guy was that he was huge, and all we heard was a chuckle (that was so obviously Vincent D’Onofrio). Who woulda guessed that a ridiculously tight shot of a torso and arm would be one of the most important shots in all of the MCU?

There were other clues too, like the fact that the Tracksuit Mafia worked for Fat Man Auto Repair. Kingpin also played a major part in Maya Lopez’s comic book origin, an origin that has been translated to Hawkeye more or less intact (Ronin has been swapped out for Daredevil, whose MCU debut might not be far off). In the comics, it was Kingpin who placed the hit on Maya’s father. He then took in the little girl, sent her to an elite school for the deaf, and trained her to be an assassin. In this episode, we learned that Ronin was sent to Fat Man Auto Repair that night by someone working directly for Kingpin — probably Maya’s best friend, Kazi (Fra Fee). It’s all coming together! So, what does this mean for the Marvel Cinematic Universe moving forward? And why is this a big deal? Well, it means that Marvel Studios is ready to deal with the Netflix-shaped hole in the MCU.

To back up a bit: way, way back in November 2013, Disney, Marvel Television, and Netflix announced that they’d struck a deal to create original, live-action series based on Marvel’s street-level heroes (Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist). It’s important to note that Marvel Television, which was overseen by Jeph Loeb, was completely different from Marvel Studios, which was and remains overseen by Kevin Feige. While the Netflix shows were touted as being part of the MCU, that sentiment really only ran in one direction. Marvel Television’s Netflix shows would reference some Marvel movie events, but the movies never concerned themselves with, like, what Iron Fist was up to on Netflix.

The partnership between Marvel Television, Disney, and Netflix started to fall apart in September 2018 when it was announced that Marvel Studios would make original TV shows for Disney+ starring movie characters played by the movie actors. From that point on, Netflix started burning off all the seasons of Marvel shows that they’d already filmed and canceling each series one by one. By June 2019, a few months prior to the launch of Disney+, all of Netflix’s Marvel shows were done. If any other streaming service wanted to use those characters, it would be a two-year wait for the contracts with Netflix to be up. And a few months later, Loeb’s Marvel Television was folded in favor of Marvel Studios.

So that brings us to 2021… two years after the end of Marvel Television. Earlier this year, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige remarked that he thinks they could probably use the Netflix characters in the Disney+ shows. And now, at the very end of 2021, we’re seeing that happen. This is a big deal because this is Marvel Studios using not only a character that was previously used by another production company on another streaming network, but it’s Marvel Studios using an actor that was cast by a whole different team of people. But come on — like Marvel Studios was going to argue with Vincent D’Onofrio playing Kingpin.

This one reveal means that all of Netflix’s characters are fair game, from Charlie Cox as Daredevil all the way to Alice Eve as Typhoid Mary. Kingpin is just the tip of the iceberg. And just to make that clear for everyone, because wow this is wild:

Who plays Kingpin in Hawkeye? It’s Vincent D’Onofrio.

It’s also telling that this episode debuted mere days before the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home in theaters. Now, the release dates of all of Marvel’s TV shows and movies have shuffled around a bunch because of COVID-19, so who knows if this was intentional. It’s just fun to point out that Netflix’s Kingpin is arriving in the MCU the same week that a whole bunch of actors who played Spider-Man villains in non-MCU Spider-Man movies are returning to the big screen.

Anyway — this reveal sets us up for Hawkeye’s grand finale, which will air next Wednesday on Disney+. How much Kingpin will we get to see? And are there more tricks left in the show’s quiver? The finale can’t come fast enough.

Stream Hawkeye on Disney+