Following a recent teaser for The Punisher season 2 that saw Frank Castle playing with fire, Netflix has dropped a brand new one, this time focusing on his nemesis and former best friend Billy Russo aka Jigsaw.
More importantly, Netflix has confirmed that all 13-episodes will be available to binge on January 18th, just two weeks away. The teaser draws parallels between Frank Castle’s extreme violence as the Punisher, and Russo’s transformation into the deformed maniac, Jigsaw. Honestly, both guys need a lot of therapy.
Based on some of the things actor Ben Barnes told io9, it sounds like Russo’s villainous arc will be kept grounded in reality, so won’t even be referred to as Jigsaw. After Castle spared his life but badly scarred his face, Russo attempted to fix it with plastic surgery. As you can see from the creepy mask he decides to wear, it didn’t really take, and that has shaken Russo’s identity to its very core…
“At the end of the first season, we hear the doctors sort of saying that that Ben’s undergone surgery for stab wounds and wounds on his face, so he’s had a plastic surgeon try to fix him.
We’re talking abut a deeply narcissistic character—in season one—whose mask of appeal in terms of doing his hair and the nice suits and all that kind of stuff has been stripped away from him. It’s about what he sees when he looks in the mirror rather than necessarily what other people see, because we didn’t want [Billy’s story] to be a horror show. It’s something more internal. We don’t refer to the character as Jigsaw in the series, but he very much has a jigsaw puzzle in his brain. It’s not about his face, it’s about the psychological, which is really something we wanted to focus on this season.
It’s not just about the physical. He’s had his head very much traumatized in the same way that many many veterans have been and he’s trying to deal with that. He’s got brain damage and severe issues with his memory. He’s trying to piece together what happened and who he is, and at one point the metaphor is used that his brain is the jigsaw they’re trying to put back together.”
I found Barnes’ turn as Russo one of the best aspects of season one, and if this is truly the end of The Punisher series I hope he gets to go out with a bang.
