Daredevil star Charlie Cox has said he did not know he would be starring opposite Sigourney Weaver in The Defenders until the day it was announced at New York Comic Con.

Cox will be uniting with his fellow Marvel TV stars in the new Netflix show, which sees Daredevil, Luke Cage played by Mike Colter, Iron Fist played by Finn Jones, and Jessica Jones played by Krysten Ritter, all come together for a new series.

Marvel’s The Defenders (Sarah Shatz/Netflix)

Alien star Weaver will play the villain in the new series but Cox has said he had no idea about the casting until the day of the big reveal.

He told the Press Association: “She’s an icon. I got a phone call from Jeph Loeb (exec VP and head of television at Marvel) before we showed up for the reveal at Comic Con in New York .

“That morning he called me and said ‘Just so you know, there is going to be the four of you on stage and one other person and it will be Sigourney Weaver’ and I was like ‘Why? Why is she going to be on stage with us? Is she moderating?’

Sigourney Weaver in Marvel’s The Defenders (Jessica Miglio/Netflix)

“He was like ‘No, she’s going to be in the show’ so the first time I met her we were already on stage and she was called out and so I was like ‘Hi’ in front of 5,000 people.

“For an actor to meet someone like Sigourney Weaver is a big deal so I had an impulse and luckily nobody handed me the mic and I didn’t get to do this but i had the impulse to say ‘in Hell’s Kitchen no-one hears you scream’ which i thought would have been fun and cool.

“But it could have been offensive, I don’t know.”

The Defenders will continue the narrative timeline of all the Marvel shows on Netflix and showrunner Marco Ramirez said keeping the stories straight was a huge task.

He said: “We had charts like mad people. We had charts of where JJ left off, charts of this is what is happened in Luke.

“When we started writing Iron First hadn’t come out so it was just ‘this is everything we think will happen on Iron Fist, this is what happened between seasons’.

Finn Jones as Iron Fist (Sarah Shatz/Netflix)

“We even had a chart telling us what season it would be, whether it was winter or fall, every kind of grid, everything, we were like Claire Danes in Homeland, we were just sitting in front of these things popping pills looking at the walls, where is the show? That was the beginning.”

He continued: “When we started Defenders, the Iron Fist writers’ room had just started so when we asked what happens in episode 13 they didn’t know.

“We all had to play ball at the same time and figure out that is where it ends so this is what we can do.”

The merging of storylines also presented challenges for Cox, who said: “It is linear but the nature of the final episode of any TV series is there is some kind of climactic ending or something has happened or changed.

Charlie Cox as Daredevil (Sarah Shatz/Netflix)

“With the end of season 2 of Daredevil I had my feelings and my ideas about what that had led him to do so there were important questions about how much time has passed? What has happened in that time? What had this character been up to? Have they carried on as normal or gone into hiding?

“And then you factor it in and keep that journey and trajectory authentic.”

The Defenders starts streaming on Netflix on August 18.