Elden Henson plays the friend: the one not in on the secret, whose job is to behave as though everything is fine. In Marvel's Daredevil he made that thankless part the warmest thing on screen, and it is what we watch him for.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Foggy Nelson in the office in Marvel's Daredevil (2015). Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock is carrying a secret and the whole series knows it. Foggy does not, and Henson plays him as a man for whom the firm is a real place with real work in it: he tells the jokes, keeps the practice going and treats its first client as if she matters, because to him she does. We wrote at the time that he was the warmth of the show, a decent, funny man who wanted to be a lawyer and got a friend with a secret instead. By the end of the first season we were fonder of him than of anyone else in Hell's Kitchen, and the reason is plain: his was the only ordinary life on the show we would have minded losing.
He has been doing this for a long time. He started in commercials at six, and most people still know him as Fulton Reed in The Mighty Ducks (1992) and its two sequels, which he says he loves. Through the 2000s he took supporting film roles, a small part in Cast Away (2000), which we liked a good deal without particularly noticing him, and The Butterfly Effect (2004). Then came Foggy, three seasons from 2015 to 2018 plus the crossovers, four outings opposite Cox in all. Around it he played Pollux in the Mockingjay films (2014–2015) for Francis Lawrence, a man who cannot speak, so the whole performance had to be done with the face and the hands. Duke Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) followed, and in 2025 he went back to Foggy for Daredevil: Born Again.
The complaint that follows him is that he never gets the lead, only the best friend or the comic relief. That is true, and it is only half a complaint. The friend who is being lied to is a difficult part to play well, because the actor knows what the character does not and has to keep it out of his eyes for thirteen hours. Henson has said he was pleased, reading the Daredevil scripts, to find "that Foggy wasn't just a useless sidekick," and he repaid the favour. His limit is the show's limit: every season ran long, thirteen episodes for a story that needed ten, and when the plot stalled Foggy was among those left standing about waiting for it to start again.
If you want to see what he does, watch the first season of Daredevil and keep an eye on the man who is not in the fight. He is doing the harder thing, which is making the office worth going back to. Whether Born Again gives him more than that to do, we will see.
Biography
Elden Henson, born Elden Ryan Ratliff on 30 August 1977 in Rockville, Maryland, is an American actor. He began working as a child model and in commercials from the age of six, receiving his SAG card in 1982. He grew up in Burbank, California, and has an actor brother, Garette Ratliff Henson.
Henson is known for playing Fulton Reed in the Mighty Ducks trilogy (1992–1996) and Foggy Nelson in the Marvel series Daredevil (2015–2018) and related productions. Other film roles include Elden Madden in Cast Away (2000), Lenny Kagan in The Butterfly Effect (2004), Pollux in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and Part 2 (2015), and Duke Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). He briefly attended Emerson College.
