Jon Bernthal goes all in. On screen, he is known for playing emotionally damaged bruisers – big on machismo, short on temper – while off it he is notorious for a deep, some might say obsessive, commitment to his roles. Extensive weapons training and periods of isolation from his family for The Punisher, intensive tennis coaching for the sports drama King Richard, Navy Seal boot camp for Fury, socialising with maximum-security prisoners for Shot Caller – whatever the part calls for, he is game. It was no different for his latest role, the corrupt Baltimore cop Wayne Jenkins.
“Wayne is a good example where I’m all the way in, and I have no shame in that,” says Bernthal. He plays Jenkins in HBO’s forthcoming series We Own This City. It is another forensic analysis of police corruption by The Wire creators, David Simon and George Pelecanos, this time portraying real events in a Baltimore still reeling from the death in custody of Freddie Gray in 2015.
Bernthal arrived in the city three months before production started and embedded himself in the Baltimore police department (BPD), learning everything he could about Jenkins from his ex-colleagues, as well as joining the BPD on patrol. When filming commenced, he didn’t stop. “There were most nights where I worked full days on the set and then I’d go with Detective Severino – my buddy Dre – right from set to drug raids.”
Today, the 45-year-old is in calmer surroundings, video-calling from his home in California, where he lives with his wife, Erin, three children (two sons and a daughter) and three rescue pitbulls. A navy vest exposes his tattooed biceps; a black beanie wraps his head, accentuating his boxer’s nose. He speaks candidly and with fervour.
Bernthal has barely come up for air since he broke through in 2010 as The Walking Dead’s antagonistic police officer Shane Walsh. He racked up six credits last year alone, including opposite Sandra Bullock in The Unforgivable and as Johnny Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark. He excels at extracting a lot from a little in supporting roles where he comes in hot, steals a scene or two, then slips away. Although brawn and bluster are his hallmarks, he has shown range more recently with subtler character work.
For four years, Jenkins led the BPD’s elite Gun Trace Task Force, achieving legendary status for his arrest statistics. The nine-man squad was supposed to be getting guns and violent criminals off the streets, but in fact spent years plundering Baltimore residents of cash, drugs and other valuables through baseless searches. They planted evidence and fraudulently clocked up overtime. After a federal investigation uncovered the 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 officers 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 flaws. I think that we have burst through that.”
His research for playing a dirty cop 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 officers, civil rights attorneys, US veterans turned African game wardens. It is a sort of Joe Rogan affair, without the baggage and bullshit.
“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 judgment. It is not about good or bad. It’s about how I can find a point of connection.”
Bernthal was raised in an affluent 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 difficult 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 flame 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 sheep of the family, testing his parents in “every single possible way”. He risked expulsion at school, was caught trafficking copies of Playboy on a camping trip aged eight, would always get in fights (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 returned 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 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 film. “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 finally 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 first son while filming 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’s military 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 find 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 ‘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 find 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. Nor does he feel the need to think strategically about the roles he takes. “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 defined 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 confidence to sit down with real temperance and respect for folks that think and feel differently 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 flaws, particularly his violent past. In 2009, he was walking along 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 $2m civil lawsuit, which was eventually 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” – by which he means 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 is available in June on Sky Atlantic and Now TV
