It’s no secret that Vincent D’Onofrio recently reprised his role as Wilson Fisk AKA the Kingpin in the season 1 finale of the Disney+ Hotstar series Hawkeye. He originally played the role in three seasons of Daredevil on Netflix, and he finally returned to his iconic role.

I won’t spoil what happens in Hawkeye (for that, you can head on over here for my breakdown of the Hawkeye finale). However, fans have been wondering if the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of the Kingpin is the same as the one from Netflix’s Daredevil.

In an interview with ScreenRant, the actor clarified by confirming that yes, his Kingpin in Hawkeye is the same as the one in Netflix’s Daredevil. This Kingpin suffered from the effects of the Thanos Snap/the Blip, and he had lost some of his initial control of the New York criminal underworld.

He said:

Well, it was going to be the same Kingpin – that it was after the blip, that he had lost some of his power, and he needed to get his city back. That’s the way I approached it. That was the storyline.

And as far as the character himself, I used everything that I used when I did it for Daredevil. It’s the same emotional life. The same character. Everything is based, whether it’s joy that’s happening, or sadness, or frustration, or anger, whatever is going on with Kingpin, it’s all through his emotional life as a child.

Yeah they don’t exist sep– they’re the same person.

Yeah. I think from my point of view, like a lot of the Avengers stuff, a lot of the MCU stuff, they tried to connect as many dots to the original canon as they can, and some dots are just not possible to connect. And that’s what we’ve done with connecting to Daredevil and vice versa.

There’s some dots [that] are connected. Like in the Hawkeye show, Fisk is obviously physically stronger and can take more physical abuse. But the key to his being an interesting character, in my mind, will always be the fact that he has this emotional life that grounds him, that makes everything work, as far as I’m concerned. We can sell that character in so many facets.

Story-wise we can sell it, if we keep him based in that emotional life. And I know that the writers, and the producers, and me, and everybody involved in the Hawkeye show, we were all on the same page about that.

I have to say that they’re very collaborative people and – not only to mention awesome people, very nice – but the producers, like I said, the writers and the directors were all just thrilled to work with so we kept along those lines. And I think that’s what will continue to make the character interesting if there’s anything next for me to do.

There you have it, folks. However, it’s better not to take his words as fact. Whether or not anything from the Marvel Netflix series is canon to the MCU is ultimately up to Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios. It’s likely that just like Disney’s approach to Star Wars‘ Expanded Universe content (or Star Wars Legends), Feige and the studio will just cherry-pick whatever they deem fit.

All six episodes of Hawkeye Season 1 are now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.