The Guardian
Monday 2 May 2022 7
sheep of the family, testing his
parents in “every single possible
way”. He risked expulsion at school,
was caught traffi cking copies of
Playboy on a camping trip aged
eight , would always get in fi ghts (his
nose has apparently been broken 13
times) and often brushed up against
the law. “Anything you can imagine,”
he says. “I made a lot of mistakes in
my life and I was headed down quite
a few roads that I probably shouldn’t
have been able to come back from.
That being said, my entire life, I
grew up with an infrastructure and
a family around me that loved me
and supported me. There’s so many
folks who don’t have that.”
As an undergraduate at Skidmore
College in New York , Bernthal was
more interested in athletics than
acting. But his acting teacher had
seen something in him. When he
dropped out, she insisted he head
to Russia to train at the renowned
Moscow Art Theatre. There, the
23-year-old found a use for his
energy and love of risk. “Once I
found acting, it was nothing short
of spiritual for me. It saved my life.
You start saying: ‘I was put on this
Earth to do this.’”
After Bernthal return ed to the US,
for a long time he did “super-raw,
avant garde theatre” where there
would often be more people on
stage than in the audience. He had
no money and couchsurfed until he
started dating Erin. A “literal angel
on this planet”, she paid the bills
with her job as an ICU trauma nurse.
Bernthal’s dream was to travel
the country as a theatre actor, but
when he tried to land stage roles in
New York he found them going to‘cut’”. He insists this can be done
while maintaining kindness and
professionalism. “You ain’t gotta
call me by any weird name!” he says,
laughing. “And you’ll never fi nd
someone that I’ve worked with that
says I’m rude or that says I didn’t
take their feelings into account. ”
Although Bernthal’s roles
typically lean into his tough guy
persona, he says he isn’t worried
about typecasting. “For better or
for worse, I don’t really think in
those terms,” he says. “I’m sure
there are these genius agents or
strategists who will say: ‘Man,
don’t oversaturate yourself,’ or:
‘You need to do a comedy,’ or:
‘Hey, man, where’s the romcom?’
I don’t know how to even begin to
operate in that way.”
When he took on the role of Lee
Iacocca in Ford v Ferrari , people
often asked him if this was a
deliberate ploy to branch out from
roles defi ned by their machismo.
“My pushback on that is Lee Iacocca
is every bit as tough or strong or
masculine as Frank Castle,” he says,
before launching into one of his
favourite subjects. “I just think we
have such a masculinity crisis going
on now,” he says. “Masculinity
has been completely corrupted
by being loud and bombastic and
unwavering and striding.”
Although he believes discipline
and strength are a part of
masculinity, equally it resides in
“empathy and grace, and having
the confi dence to sit down with real
temperance and respect for folks
that think and feel diff erently than
you,” he says. “I think kindness
is masculinity just as much as
these other components. Look at
the components of the Samurai- yes, it was sword work, but it
was also calligraphy.”
Bernthal is candid about his fl aws,
particularly his violent past. In
2009, he was walking on a beach in
California when a drunk man called
his dog over and grabbed it. Bernthal
retrieved the dog, but the man
began following him. Eventually,
Bernthal snapped and punched
the man in the face, knocking him
unconscious. Bernthal landed
three years’ probation and a $2 m
civil lawsuit, which was settled
out of court. It was an epiphany for
Bernthal, who recognised he needed
therapy to control his rage.
“If you talk to folks who knew me
as a young man, they would tell you:
‘It was not gonna work out for this
guy,’ ” says Bernthal. “But I found
this thing [acting]. I’ve worked on
it like crazy ; I put everything I have
into it. And it really is a dream – I’m
living a dream. ”
There is, he says, no chance of
slipping back into old ways. “My
life consists of my wife, my kids
and my work. I’m able to take all of
that energy, and all of that danger
and throw it all into my work. And
I’m so grateful for that , because
I know how badly it could have
gone. I can literally say, with my
head held high: ‘I’m safe from that
now.’ I know how to create danger,
but I know how to do it in a totally
healthy way.”
We Own This City will be available in
June on Sky Atlantic and Now TV
Masculinity has
been completely
corrupted by
being loud and
bombastic and
unwavering
extortion, the unit was disbanded
and eight of the nine were
convicted. Jenkins was sentenced
to 25 years in prison, although that
didn’t stop Bernthal interviewing
him. We Own This City shies away
from monstering the BPD. It is more
concerned with scrutinising the
culture of quota-based, reactionary
policing that proved fertile ground
for overreach and corruption to
thrive. The priority was truth, rather
than entertainment, says Bernthal :
“It was done with sensitivity, with
respect, with a journalistic integrity
to really tell the truth in all of its
complications and to not preach
and not to have agendas .”
“The police need to have
culpability for their actions,” he
adds. “What I hear from police
offi cers is that the biggest problem
with policing is there’s been this
culture of refusing to admit you’re
wrong, standing by each other, not
pointing out fl aws. I think that we
have burst through that.”
His research for playing a dirty
copy has not dented his respect
for the police. “People who have
no experience in the communities
that absolutely rely on police to
keep them safe were talking about
abolishing the police or defunding
the police , and anyone who’s
ever really spent time in these
neighbourhoods understood that
that was completely ridiculous.”
He knows a lot of people will
disagree , but he is constantly
calling for dialogue across all
cultural sore spots, not just
policing. He hopes he can lead by
example with his weekly podcast,
Real Ones With Jon Bernthal ,
which launched in February. The
premise is to interview “authentic
people living on the frontlines of
the big issues” – police offi cers,
civil rights attorneys, US veterans
turned African game wardens.
It is a sort of Joe Rogan aff air,
without the baggage.
“I’m able to form really close
relationships with folks,” he says.
“Part of my job is to be able to sit
down with anyone – like with Wayne
- and reserve judg ment. It is not
about good or bad. It’s about how
I can fi nd a point of connection .”
Bernthal was raised in an affl uent
Washington DC suburb , the middle
of three brothers, but his home was
always brimming with more – his
friends and the foster children
his parents would take in. Some
arrived angry or withdrawn, after
diffi cult experiences. “No matter
what a kid did when they came in
the house, my mom was always
able to see a light and stoke the
fl ame of these young kids’ hearts.
“Everybody basically grew up
in my house,” he says. “My dad
had a no-locked-doors policy. We
were burglarised seven times and
he refused to lock the door. Any
kid, anybody who was in trouble,
you could come to my house.
I am so grateful for this family.
There’s no words to explain the
depth of richness of the folks that
I grew up with .”
Compared with his high-
achieving brothers (one is now
a CEO, the other an orthopaedic
oncologist), Bernthal was the black
actors who had already made their
names on TV. “I had no idea that it
was going to be about trying to get
on a soap opera, and I really railed
against it,” he says. He initially
resisted doing TV and fi lm. “It was
naivety and just being a stupid
pompous theatre guy ... I was being
a real big idiot when I said: ‘I’ll never
do that – that’s for sellouts.’ That was
just some young man stupid shit.”
When he fi nally got into TV,
he instantly fell in love with the
medium. The Walking Dead was
a turning point in many ways – he
married Erin and had his fi rst
son while fi lming the series, and
it opened enough doors for him
to land the role of The Punisher,
Marvel’s US marine turned
mercenary Frank Castle. Acclaimed
actors he had worked with –
notably Brad Pitt and Leonardo
DiCaprio – had warned him against
superhero roles. But Bernthal
was drawn to the character’smilitary background, his love for
his family and his grounding. “I
started seeing what it was and how
unbelievably human this guy was- no capes, no invisibility and no
shooting rays out of his eyes.”
Castle is a loner who turns to
vigilantism after his family are shot
dead. To fi nd the character, Bernthal
would isolate himself from the crew - and sometimes from his family.
You could describe this immersion in
a role as method acting – something
that Bernthal studied in Moscow.
There has been some criticism of
the method in recent weeks – Mads
Mikkelsen called it “bullshit” and
Will Poulter suggested it has been
used as an excuse for inappropriate
behaviour – but Bernthal insists
that is misplaced.
“The term has been so
unbelievably bastardised,” he says.
“Being a theatre snob who studied
two years in the Moscow Art
Theatre, I know that method acting - when we think of it as somebody
who stays in character all the
time – is not what [Konstantin]
Stanislavski taught. That is not
what it is. Period. There’s been
something that took over movie
actors for a long time, where it was
like their process became louder
than their performance.”
For Bernthal, the issue is that he
can’t just “turn it on”. The process
is simply about isolating himself
to get into the right frame of mind
for the “precious, sacred seconds
that exist between ‘action’ and
With Jamie
Hector in We
Own This CityThe Punisher;
(below) with
Vera Farmiga
in The Many
Saints of
Newark