Acting saved my life says The Punisher’s Jon Bernthal

Jon Bernthal reflects on how a screwed up underachiever from a good family made it in Hollywood.

Jon Bernthal as Marvel's The Punisher

Ever since making an unforgettable impression in two seasons of The Walking Dead as Shane, the treacherous friend of lead character Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Jon Bernthal has gone from strength to strength.

To action-loving audiences the 47-year-old is known for his antihero in the Marvel series The Punisher, and he starred in the HBO cop miniseries We Own This City as well as the 2022 series American Gigolo.

Of late he has appeared in flashbacks in the hit series The Bear playing Michael Berzatto, the dead brother of chef Carmen (Jeremy Allen White) – a role that brought him nominations for an Emmy and other awards.

He also takes smaller parts in projects he is keen to support, such as his pivotal role in director Ava DuVernay’s forthcoming film Origin, based on the true story of journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson, the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Wilkerson is played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Bernthal plays Brett Hamilton, her beloved, supportive husband.

Origin is based on Wilkerson’s 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, her exploration of race and hierarchy in the US, deemed an instant American classic by The New York Times and lauded by Barack Obama. Bernthal is a huge fan of the book.

“Personally, I believe so much in the sociological philosophy that Isabel presented,” he says during our interview over Zoom.

“I believe so much in Ava and the journey she went on to make this movie, raising the money really on her own. And I’m in awe of Aunjanue, who I worked with on King Richard. So I really wanted to be in service of this movie because I really believe in these three wonderful women.”

Hamilton, a mathematician and financial analyst, died from brain cancer at 46. He was hugely supportive of his wife and her work, and she in turn was incredibly loyal – she never married again.

“It was a certain brand of marriage and a certain type of character that I’ve never gotten to play before – it’s something you just don’t see very often in movies,” Bernthal says. “I really fought for it and I’m glad that I did.”

Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin.

It is the actor’s most romantic and most loveable role to date, and reflects his own life. “One of the qualities in marriage that I have, that Brett has, is I’m completely in awe of my wife,” Bernthal says. “I think being in awe of your partner is a recipe for a happy marriage. I am so blown away by my wife; I have so much respect for her and her grit and work ethic.”

Bernthal’s wife, trauma nurse Erin Angle, supported him when he was a struggling actor and they now have three children and live in California. Photographs of the actor on his family couch with his kids grace the internet, yet the image of a happy family man seems to go against the hard men he famously plays. Then again, his Punisher vigilante, marine turned mercenary Frank Castle, is driven by the loss of his wife and kids.

“I don’t think I could play that part unless I really knew what it was like to love someone or to care about people so much more than I care about myself. My family is not only my primary focus, it’s my life, and everything else that I do is in service of that.”

He concedes that an early troubled life fed into his Punisher role. “There’s no question. I had a dark past for sure.”

Is it true his nose was broken 13 times in his youth? “Yeah, a lot. Let’s just put it that way. One of my personal philosophies and what I try to tell my kids is I think only if you’ve really been in the valley can you get to the mountaintop.

“There’s so much that I owe to this art: it really saved my life. And I think that had I not been so lost, and had I not walked into so many walls and hit so many dead ends, had I not gotten into so much trouble, that the salvation of what this art brought me might not have happened.

“That’s where my work ethic, my determination, my reverence, my commitment all comes from.”

Bernthal as The Punisher with co-star Jason R. Moore. Picture: David Giesbrecht

Reared in Washington DC, Bernthal was athletic and keyed up in his youth, and the black sheep of an exceptional family. His father, a former lawyer, and mother would take in foster children and had an open-door policy. Young Jon grew up in the shadow of two talented brothers.

What does his family think about his career now? “They can’t believe it,” Bernthal replies with his trademark wide grin. “I was not expected to make it this long. It was not looking good for me. My brothers were always wildly successful. My little brother was an elite athlete and played at an enormously high level in college, and now he’s a cancer surgeon (Nicholas Bernthal is also a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.)

“My older brother was always this ­genius in business (Tom Bernthal is now a chief executive and is married to billionaire former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg) and I was the guy that could not stay out of trouble. I just could not find my way.

“I think it’s a real lesson in parenthood. I cannot imagine what it was like to be my mom or dad as a young person. There was just this litany of people who said ‘this kid’s no good, he does horrible things, he gets in trouble with the law and gets kicked out of schools’.

“We joke about it now, but my parents never gave up on me. They always said that there was an inherent goodness in me and they always reminded me of that. But I don’t know that they sit there now and say, ‘Wow, we’re so proud of our son.’ I think they’re mostly just very, very relieved, and very shocked.”

Bernthal’s road to stardom began when on the advice of his university acting teacher he studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School from 1999 to 2001 and developed a method acting style in the vein of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.

“I remember my teachers said there are three places where you can draw inspiration as an actor. You can say, ‘Oh, I love the way that Pacino or De Niro did this’; or you can listen to music, you can look at paintings and you can get inspired that way; or the third way, and to me the most important way, is to live a full life and to draw from your experiences, times where you were petrified, times where you were barbaric, times where you were truly joyful and gleeful. I feel so unbelievably lucky that my path has been one where I really went through it, I really did live life and I still continue to live life. But I also learnt these acting techniques.”

Always athletic, Bernthal went on to thoroughly immerse himself in his characters, embedding himself in the Baltimore Police Department for We Own This City, undergoing extensive weapons training for The Punisher, intensive tennis coaching for his role as the Williams sisters’ coach in King Richard and US Navy SEAL boot camp for the World War II movie Fury, alongside Brad Pitt.

Bernthal in We Own This City.

As for The Bear, Bernthal calls the show “a gift”. “I did it not knowing what it was, I did it as a favour to my dear friend Ebon Moss-Bach­rach,” he says of the actor who had shared some of the best scenes in The Punisher’s first season and who won an Emmy for his Cousin Richie role in The Bear. “My first gig ever was understudying Ebon in an off-Broadway play and since then we’ve done three or four things together. He’s somebody I’ve rooted for, for so long. And now he’s really getting his due, and it’s so well deserved.”

Bernthal is a fan of the frenetic award-winning comedy show that he says is “truly remarkable and singular”. “(Series creator) Chris Storer is a generational talent and in the second season he really let me come to play. I’m just grateful to be a part of the show and I look forward to working with him again.” Seasons three and four of The Bear will soon shoot back-to-back.

But first it’s back to action. Bernthal is in training as he reprises the Punisher for Marvel series Daredevil: Born Again, and he is involved in another “action-heavy project” that he will not disclose. Since our interview the sequel to his 2016 film The Accountant has been announced in which he again will play Brax Wolff, brother to Ben Affleck’s autistic genius Christian.

Is it hard playing these intense characters? “I don’t know, I want it to be hard. I think if it were easy to play a character like The Punisher who’s reeling from losing his wife and kids, that would be a real big problem. I recently watched Fury with my kid and the intensity of that film was unparalleled. I look for that intensity. I’m not looking for it to be light and effortless.”

Origin releases in cinemas on April 4. The Punisher, Daredevil and The Bear stream on Disney+.