Jon Bernthal
There's a first time for everything and this is my first interview with a Hollywood movie star. Ojai resident Jon Bernthal is one of the industry's most prolific actors and just possibly one of its best. I spoke to him about how acting saved his life, how he's prioritizing his work now and why he loves living in Ojai.
WHEN Jon Bernthal takes on a role, he goes all in. From rigorous military training and periods of complete isolation in preparation for Marvel’s The Punisher, to intensive tennis coaching for sports biopic King Richard, and hanging out with maximum-security prisoners for crime thriller Shot Caller – whatever a character demands, Bernthal will give it everything. So when he read the leading part in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon at the Ojai Playwrights Conference last August and had just one hour to prepare, he was evidently thrown. “Man, I felt like 80% of the time I was just reading,” he says almost apologetically. Not that anybody noticed. In fact his portrayal of Sonny Wojtowicz, the gay bank robber whose heist goes horribly wrong, was so full of intense energy and raw emotion, it had a packed Matilija Auditorium completely captivated.
It is this willingness to plunge deeply into character and to give nothing less than 100% no matter what the circumstances, that defines Bernthal. It also explains why he has become one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors. In the last 18 months alone, the 46-year-old starred in five movies, including the firefighting thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead with Angelina Jolie, The Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, the Sandra Bullock drama The Unforgivable, and Lena Dunham’s comedy Sharp Stick. And that’s just the big screen. Meanwhile on TV he committed himself fully for his portrayal of corrupt Baltimore cop Sgt Wayne Jenkins in the HBO drama We Own This City (more on that later,) and stripped down as Julian Kaye in the Showtime miniseries American Gigolo, a remake of the 1980s classic.
He’s certainly been a busy man, but right now Bernthal is taking a break. And being home in Ojai, doing school runs, attending kids’ birthday parties, baseball games, and dinners with friends at his favorite local hangout Deer Lodge almost makes him seem like an ordinary guy. “In Ojai, I’m Henry, Billy and Addie’s dad and nothing else, and that’s exactly what I want to be when I come home,” he says, adding that moving here with his wife Erin in 2015 was the “best decision of their lives.” “There’s something about Ojai and the people who are from here that is just so incredibly special,” he enthuses. “It’s a connection to the land, a kindness and pride in the community but at the same time a curiosity about people who aren’t from here. I feel so grateful to be able to return here after spending a lot of time away and it’s an amazing place for my kids to grow up in.”
Bernthal in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in August 2022.
Bernthal’s own upbringing is somewhat more checkered. While he was raised in an affluent suburb of Washington DC the son of a lawyer, and attended the ultra-prestigious Sidwell Friends School, he describes his younger self as a troublemaker, who “made a lot of stupid mistakes.” The middle of three high-achieving brothers – his older brother Tom is now a CEO and married to Sheryl Sandberg, the recently retired COO of Facebook, while his younger brother Nicholas is an orthopedic oncologist and executive medical director at UCLA – Bernthal says he spent most of his adolescence without any aspirations at all. “For a long time I was lost, without any direction,” he admits. “I had no calling and so my calling was trouble.” From risking expulsion at school to getting into street fights (his nose has been broken 14 times), and brushing up against the law, Bernthal insists his only saving grace was his family. “I was a total mess but unlike a lot of other people I knew, I had a family that loved me and never, ever gave up on me,” he says. “So many folks I knew didn’t have that kind of support system, and I saw their lives ruined because of it.”
Bernthal went on to Skidmore College in upstate New York, where he was “more interested in playing sports than anything else.” He continued to get himself into trouble and eventually dropped out. But it was here that his acting teacher, Alma Becker, saw something in him: “She put me in a play, and I fell in love with it. From then on I knew that this was it for me.” Wanting to steer him away from his unruly friends, Becker pushed her former student to go to Russia and study at the renowned Moscow Art Theatre, a move Bernthal credits with “saving his life.” Against all odds, the rigorous discipline and intense competitiveness of the theater school, brought out the very best in the troubled young actor. “They saw 10,000 kids and took in 100. We had to do ballet, boxing, singing and every semester they cut the class in half. It was very cutthroat,” he recalls. Yet there was a national appreciation and pride in the art of theater in Russia that Bernthal hadn’t experienced before, and this completely changed him. “It wasn’t about getting a bus to LA and getting famous; it was a deep reverence and commitment to the theater, and it was such an incredibly vibrant scene,” he explains.
Bernthal returned to the US and launched his own company in New York doing “super-raw, avant-garde theater,” which gained him a spot at Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training but did little to advance his career. “For about seven years, I really struggled,” he says, adding that there were long periods of time where he had no work at all and was supported by Erin, who paid the bills with her job as an ICU trauma nurse.
Bernthal as Sgt Wayne Jenkins in the HBO mini series We Own This City.
The turning point came in 2010, when Bernthal was cast for the leading role of Shane Walsh in The Walking Dead. “This was at a time of my life where I’d had my last bout of trouble and had hit rock bottom,” he says referring to an incident in 2009, when a drunk man attempted to steal his dog on Venice Beach, which led him to knock the man unconscious. Bernthal was arrested and told that if the man didn’t wake up, he’d spend the rest of his life in prison. “That was the moment I realized I had to change, and the world really came back and rewarded that change in me,” he says. He married Erin and had his first son, Henry, while filming the Walking Dead, and over the next decade landed role after role in some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters starring alongside A-Listers such as Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street), Brad Pitt (Fury), Ben Affleck (The Accountant), Liam Neeson (Widows), Matt Damon and Christian Bale (Ford v Ferrari), Will Smith (King Richard), and the late Ray Liotta (The Many Saints of Newark). “I went 10 years straight without stopping, moving from set to set to set,” he says.
Known for playing tough guys and bruisers, Bernthal’s method of immersing himself in his characters is clearly rooted in his classical training in Russia. But he also credits his upbringing, his own troubles with the law, as well as his parents’ decision to take foster children into their family home, with teaching him to find humanity in everyone. “My mom had this incredible ability to see the light in all of these kids and I was raised with this cogent understanding that there’s beauty within everyone and that has deeply influenced me,” he explains. “It taught me to understand that we’re all human beings, we all want the best for our kids, we all have fears and insecurities, and there’s light in everyone. This understanding allows me to really dig in and ask the questions: What does this character feel, what are their fears, their hopes, their desires, their disappointments, tragedies, and triumphs?”
It was perhaps his portrayal of Sgt Jenkins in We Own This City that has garnered Bernthal the most attention. Created by the team behind The Wire, the series focuses on a group of corrupt Baltimore police officers from the city’s Gun Trace Task Force in one of the most infamous policing scandals in recent history. Jenkins, the leader of the group, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Bernthal says that taking on this role was an absolute no-brainer for him. “Race and policing have defined so much of my upbringing and what I care about so [this role] ticked so many different boxes, not just in terms of the subject matter but also the people I wanted to work with. It allowed me to really work the way I want to work and that is to go all in.”
The actor spent three months prior to filming visiting Jenkins in prison, and embedding himself in the Baltimore police department, learning everything he could about the former cop from his ex-colleagues, and going on nightly patrols, joining drug busts and gun raids. “I went there as an artist, and came with respect and without judgement, wanting to tell one of the darkest chapters of the Baltimore police force and they gave me all the access I wanted,” he says. “I was able to dive in in the way that I want to dive in, going to places I couldn’t even believe I was able to go, which was such an honor. And that ability to immerse myself in a job is now a major criterion [when choosing work].”
Bernthal’s cagey about what’s next and declines to comment on industry rumors about the return of The Punisher and The Accountant. But he insists that his decision to take a break is giving him the space he needs to think about the future. “I know I need to be inspired by the people I work with and also be challenged by them. I know I need to only work on projects that are deeply personal either to me or to the person making it. I don’t want to be in commerce-based art, I know can’t do that,” he says. “The amazing thing is I now have choices, and that is an incredible blessing.”
This article was the cover feature of the Ojai Magazine’s Winter 2022 edition. You can read the online version of the magazine here.
