The night Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin mistook Jon Bernthal for a homeless person: “That was you?”
If there’s one minor drawback to the monumental Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey, it is that the first ten minutes or so take some getting used to, mostly due to the fact that Tom Holland is slightly not right for the role, and keeps saying ‘dad’ instead of ‘father’, and it’s all a bit weird. But one piece of casting that is undeniably on the money is Jon Bernthal as Menelaus.
You can almost imagine the meeting in the casting director’s room when they said, ‘We need a no-nonsense, hard-nosed warrior type with a shaved head and a beard for this Spartan warrior king guy’, and the inevitable hand that went up before someone said, ‘Oh, what about Jon Bernthal, he’d be perfect’.
And of course, he is, without pulling up any trees particularly, although he probably could. Bernthal is utterly convincing as Odysseus’ take-no-prisoners (especially in Troy) partner in combat, because he has now basically perfected that kind of role as a violent, salt-of-the-earth supporting character. He essentially just does what he does in The Punisher, only in a tunic and sandals instead of a sweatshirt with a skull on it.
Add that to the characters he played in The Walking Dead and the brilliant 2017 thriller Wind River, Brad Pitt’s war movie Fury and the uber-tense Sicario, and you know what you’re going to get with Bernthal. Solid, excellent, barely-controlled anger, and makes pretty much everything better by his presence, with often a cigar in his mouth.
But that would suggest something of a linear journey for Bernthal to this point, and it has been anything but that. In fact, as he was finding success for his work as sheriff’s deputy Shane Walsh in The Walking Dead, he was facing serious charges for hitting a man so hard in a row over a dog that he was knocked out before he hit the ground, the actor eventually being handed three years probation and a $2million civil lawsuit.
That caused him to take anger management classes to avoid his famously volatile nature from completely derailing his career, but even in the years before that, as he worked his way up from doing bit parts in TV shows to a supporting role in an Oliver Stone movie with 2006’s World Trade Centre, he was struggling with his image and wasn’t able to pay the bills.
The same year as the film came out, Bernthal had been bought a plane ticket to LA by his brother in order to kickstart his career in Hollywood. He wanted to see the White Stripes, who were playing at a venue in the city, but couldn’t afford the ticket, so he sat outside with a bottle of liquor. Coincidentally, Family Guy’s Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin walked by him, with Bernthal addressing the latter by shouting, “Hey, Mac, how you doing?”
The pair stopped to speak to him and gave him their spare backstage pass to the show, a night Bernthal remembers as one of the best of his life. Several years later, and much more well-known, he met up with Green again when he recorded a voice for his Robot Chicken animated show, and he mentioned the White Stripes gig. Green replied, “That was you? We thought we were helping out a homeless dude”.
Next up, at the end of the month, Bernthal will be back on the big screens in another blockbuster, again causing chaos, and again with Tom Holland, this time as Frank Castle, AKA The Punisher, in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
