“I had no interest in that”: how Jon Bernthal became everything he despised
These days, Jon Bernthal is Mr Franchise.
From his early days on The Walking Dead to his recent appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it feels like there’s always a chance he could crop up in a big movie or TV show, and while he has embraced fame nowadays, it wasn’t always his ambition to be somebody people recognised.
Following a turbulent stint in school, Bernthal turned to theatre with the hopes of starting over, which involved him relocating to Russia to join the Moscow Art Theatre School, where he even played baseball at a professional level for a local team. He was brought back to America to study theatre at Harvard before embarking on a career in it, so before he ever appeared on TV or in a movie, he’d already tackled some meaty roles, including that of Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello.
Bernthal didn’t hate the movies or anything like that. He didn’t even hate big franchises, as evidenced by his love of the Rocky movies, and he also wasn’t averse to taking one-off gigs for mid-range TV shows like Law & Order and Boston Legal in order to pay the bills. At this early stage in his career, though, he always felt profoundly uncomfortable when auditioning for the screen, as he explained to GQ.
“I would walk into rooms and feel so ugly,” he recalled, “My nose, my ears… I fit into this weird box because it’s like, ‘Is he a leading man? He’s not that good-looking. He’s kind of this mongrel’. I looked at film actors and TV actors as sellouts. I had no interest in that.”
Nobody in their right mind would ever call Bernthal “ugly”, but it’s true that he doesn’t fit the traditional mould of a Hollywood star. When he was first coming up in the early 2000s, the high-drawing male actors like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Ben Affleck were much cleaner and prettier matinee idols.
Bernthal was a tough guy, with sharp features and a face that looked like it had seen some action. He was several decades out of time, because if he’d had been making a name for himself in the 1980s, he’d have been right up with his hero Sylvester Stallone. Even as he got over his fear of auditioning and found himself in bigger and bigger roles, Bernthal was still never quite able to land the lead. Even in The Wolf of Wall Street, which he considers to be a career highlight, he’s reduced to a supporting role behind another ‘pretty boy’, Leonardo DiCaprio.
It wasn’t really until he got the part of Frank Castle in The Punisher that he finally got to spread his wings. Outside of that, however, he’s still viewed very much as a supporting player; even The Punisher has become a subordinate to other superheroes like Daredevil and Spider-Man.
There’s still a lot of road left in Bernthal’s career, so hopefully somebody will take a chance on him and give him the big lead part he deserves. At the very least, we hope he feels a bit better about his appearance these days, because if he’s not good-looking, then what chance do the rest of us stand?
