When Jon Bernthal was cast as a petty drug dealer in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s 2013 white-collar crime epic, the actor wasn’t even supposed to have many lines. But Bernthal went into that film intending to take his shot. So he came in for a wordless B-roll scene in which the script had him lifting weights in a backyard, asked the second-unit director to mic him and riffed for 45 minutes. Scorsese wasn’t there that day, but here’s what he saw in the footage: a shirtless Bernthal curling dumbbells, tormenting some teenage boys with a baseball bat and peacocking his virility. “Bring some of them chicks around here sometime,” he says. Then Bernthal makes a brilliant little decision about his tough guy’s whereabouts. “Hey, Ma, we got chicken or what?” he yells toward the house. “Ma!” There was no “Ma” in the script. No one even said he lived with his mother.
The role introduced Bernthal as an excellent character actor. Since then, he has become the guy who shows up onscreen unexpectedly, delivers the most memorable performance in a scene or two and then vanishes. This is perhaps why he’s so often playing dead men in flashbacks. He’s the dramatic center of gravity in FX’s “The Bear,” appearing just once or twice per season as the deceased family patriarch, and the tragic romantic in the 2017 Taylor Sheridan film “Wind River.” Bernthal was so good in “The Accountant,” an improbable 2016 Ben Affleck-led movie about an autistic accountant turned gunslinger, that the filmmakers made this year’s sequel a two-hander.
Bernthal has had leading roles too, most notably in “We Own This City,” the HBO miniseries about Baltimore police corruption in which the actor’s performance was criminally overlooked. But for the most part, he has carved out a career of supporting roles. So it made perfect sense when he told me that one of his favorite movies is “True Romance,” Tony Scott’s 1993 adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s first script. Christian Slater may have been the lead, but it was the supporting characters played by Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Dennis Hopper who stole the film. “There are so many people who are in it for a scene or two,” Bernthal said, “but you could have made a movie about any one of those characters.”
We were having breakfast in Ojai, Calif., where Bernthal lives. The previous day, he returned from New York where he was promoting “The Accountant 2.” Before that he was in Greece and Morocco, filming a role in “The Odyssey” with Christopher Nolan, which is perhaps the greatest honor that can be bestowed on a dramatic actor these days. In front of him was a pile of egg whites, spinach, fruit and gluten-free toast. “I’m like a gorilla,” he said. “I eat a lot.”
Most actors, once they get lead roles, are advised to turn down anything smaller. But Bernthal is allergic to strategizing about how to become a leading man or listening to agents and managers who want to find him a “star vehicle.” The only real mistake he made in his career, he told me, happened because he let that sort of thinking get in his head. But he has switched agents since then. He knows he has become the guy who everyone calls for a favor, but then again “The Bear” was a favor. And that turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of Bernthal’s career. The intensity he brought to the role won him an Emmy, and now he has even co-written an episode in the upcoming season. “I can’t imagine deciding what you’re going to do in this super-tenuous field while being so dependent on some businessman’s strategy,” he said.
And yet Bernthal, who is 48, is in a strange place in his career. He has become too big to audition but not quite big enough to open a movie on his own. (Affleck told me he thought that Bernthal was one role away from it.) He is either offered a part outright or he’s on some list — “and if so-and-so doesn’t do it, they’re really thinking about coming to you,” he said, paraphrasing his agents. But the truth is that Bernthal loves auditioning. It is the only time that he can do whatever he wants with a character. That’s how he got Al Pacino’s iconic part in next year’s Broadway adaptation of “Dog Day Afternoon.” The producers initially wanted a younger star, but Bernthal spent a year convincing them otherwise. “More than anyone else that read, his vulnerability was off the charts,” Stephen Adly Guirgis, the playwright, told me. “Jon is an extremely masculine guy, but that ache and that need for love, he’s able to access that.”
This is what Bernthal’s collaborators say makes him special: the mix of bravado and unexpected sensitivity, and the way he’s able to locate all of the nuances in between. At first, I saw the bravado. That morning, he picked me up in an imposing black Ford pickup truck with tinted windows. (“You can write about this,” he said as he ran a red light.) He wore a ripped Baltimore Police Department sweatshirt, a souvenir from the HBO show, unzipped to reveal a large, silver boxing-glove pendant dangling on his bare chest. Wu-Tang Clan blared over his speakers. But then there was the vulnerability. Bernthal is as proficient in the plays of Anton Chekhov as he is in martial arts. He is terribly afraid of crickets. In the passenger door of his truck, I noticed a tiny paper crane, left there by his 10-year-old daughter. His nose belies a history of violence. Before we met, I read profiles of Bernthal in men’s magazines that boasted about his having broken it 14 times. He estimated that number is higher now. But the first time he broke it, he told me, he asked his father if he was dying.
Bernthal is an actor. I don’t mean just a regular Hollywood actor. But one of the very few who actually studied at the Moscow Art Theater, the birthplace of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s famed method for actors that has since been misinterpreted to varying degrees by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and that one actor from “Succession.” How Bernthal got there is a roundabout story that begins in Washington, D.C., where he was born and raised, as the middle of three boys. His father was a lawyer and his mother a social worker who took in foster children. The hypocrisy of Washington bugged Bernthal — all that wealth and power surrounded by poverty and ill-funded public schools. Bernthal attended Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school where Chelsea Clinton enrolled in 1993 a couple grades below him.
In the 1980s, Washington experienced high crime rates. The second time Bernthal broke his nose was when he was jumped and robbed on the Metro in middle school. As Bernthal sought out friends from neighborhoods rougher than his own, he became ashamed of how fearful he was to fight or to defend himself. Resolving to change, he learned taekwondo and boxing and found reasons to fight outside the ring. “I think Jon was really drawn to the excitement and pure testosterone-fueled like, ‘Me and my boys are going out and this night could turn any way,’” his younger brother, Nick, told me. The Bernthal brothers are high achievers. Nick is an orthopedic surgeon. The eldest, Tom, is a successful businessman who’s married to Sheryl Sandberg. Nick said that few things enraged Bernthal or brought him more joy than rushing to the defense of someone he loved, including his brothers. “But he was itching for it,” Nick added. “He went out looking for those slights.”
Bernthal played baseball, which is how he got accepted at Skidmore College. By accident, he signed up for an acting class, where he made up a story about his mother giving him a catcher’s mitt on her deathbed. Suddenly Bernthal was crying, and so was the rest of the class. His teacher, Alma Becker, cast him as Roger Chillingworth in the school’s production of “The Scarlet Letter.” Bernthal was surprised how much he liked acting. It felt as if he was risking something each time he was onstage. And, unlike a fist fight, it was victimless. Finding acting, however, did not stop Bernthal from flunking out of college or ending up in jail cells as a result of fighting. With few options left, he took Becker’s advice and auditioned for the Art Theater.
Bernthal arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1999 and moved into a dorm near Gorky Park. For a kid who considered himself pretty street-smart, he was quickly humbled. Moscow was a lawless place. There was unthinkable violence in the streets. The police would routinely shake down citizens for bribes. A series of apartment bombings would soon incite the Second Chechen War and bring Vladimir Putin to power. Bernthal remembers being knocked over by the beauty and openness of the people and the brutality that surrounded them. “I never saw such rampant cruelty and complete, brazen disinterest in people’s feelings,” he said. “That coldness with the warmth.”
Russian theater, meanwhile, was like a military school for Bernthal. His teachers had staged unsanctioned plays during the Soviet era, risking imprisonment and the gulag. One of them feigned insanity and was confined to a mental institution for three years. Theater represented real danger — real anarchy. It was something they were willing to die for. There were monuments to playwrights and artists all over the city. Bernthal’s teachers were treated like decorated generals. Students stood up when they entered a room. Bernthal quickly learned that one way to get Moscow police to leave him alone was tell them that he was a student of Oleg Tabakov, a respected Russian actor. And the training was rigorous, full of not just daily acting and focus exercises but also acrobatics and ballet. For the first year, the actors didn’t even have speaking roles. Bernthal fondly remembers pulling all-nighters at the theater, chain-smoking and drinking bottles of Baltika, working on playing a child, which was one of the assignments. Students that weren’t good enough were routinely cut from the program. “It was a very intense, masculine way of approaching art that I could really vibe with,” Bernthal said.
Later, when Bernthal lived in New York and Los Angeles, he found some American acting schools coddling and predatory. “It’s like people have a dream,” he said. “I want to make money off of your dream.” It didn’t seem to matter that the teachers were people for whom that dream had mostly not worked out or that the majority of students fell into debt and had no shot of making it. “In Moscow, they would’ve been told, ‘This isn’t for you,’” he said. “‘It’s not going to work out.’”
In 2000, Bernthal’s performance in Chekhov’s “The Bear” drew the attention of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, which had a partnership with the Moscow theater. Within a year, Bernthal went from repeated arrests and dropping out of college to enrolling at Harvard.
If going to Moscow was the first turning point in Bernthal’s life, the second came in 2009. Bernthal was living in Venice, Calif., then. He spent the previous decade moving between Cambridge, Mass., Moscow and New York, where he performed in experimental plays in Bushwick and mostly failed to get parts on soap operas. In Los Angeles, he was stuck acting on a network TV show he didn’t particularly like. One night that summer, Bernthal took his two pit bulls for a walk. He came across a couple in their 60s playing a didgeridoo and stopped to listen to the music. A drunken man began taunting the wife, pantomiming a sexual act with the didgeridoo. The couple stopped playing. Bernthal saw the broken look on the husband’s face and tried to suppress his anger. He started to walk away, but the guy and his friends followed him. As one of them pushed him in the back, Bernthal turned around and swung.
The drunken man lost consciousness before his head split open on the pavement. “I would like to be able to tell you that I was horrified I might’ve just taken someone’s life,” Bernthal said, “but the scary thing is that was not even a weird night for me back then.” Bernthal was soon handcuffed to a bench at a police station. He saw two clear paths. Either he was going to prison and would have to become the worst version of himself. Or, if he could just get one more lifeline, he swore he would change. “I really will,” he said in his head, to whoever was listening.
The man eventually woke up. Bernthal was charged with felony assault, and the man sued him for $2 million. (Criminal charges were reduced to misdemeanors after witnesses came forward; the civil suit was settled out of court.) Bernthal took anger-management courses. He went to therapy. The following July, a year after the Venice incident, Bernthal was filming AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which jump-started his career. Days after the first season wrapped, he married his girlfriend, Erin, a trauma nurse he’d been dating since returning from Moscow. “We’re pretty sure my wife got pregnant with our first that night,” he told me.
But as Bernthal left his former self behind, that self started showing up in his roles. “The Walking Dead,” in which he played a volatile hothead, set him on a steady path of playing cops, mobsters, military guys and dirtbags. When we met in May, Bernthal was rehearsing an Ojai production of “Ironbound,” a play about a New Jersey cleaning woman and her two-timing boyfriend.
Bernthal has been living in Ojai for more than a decade with his wife and three children. It was Emily Blunt, who Bernthal worked with on Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario,” who told him about the small valley town northwest of Los Angeles. Bernthal’s younger son is now the starting quarterback for his youth football team. His daughter works at a horse ranch and rides rodeo. Bernthal coaches middle-school football and basketball. He loves Ojai so much that he wrote an entire monologue about it for his character in “Wind River.” (“It’s like fruit farms and vineyards and there’s these mountains surrounding it. …”)
Bernthal sees Ojai as a town in quiet conflict. The influx of L.A. people — fleeing Covid, fires, crime — has been displacing the blue-collar population. In 2023, the middle school closed, because the new residents tend to send their children to private schools. Bernthal, a reluctant private-school kid, is unsurprisingly annoyed by this. This spring he decided to start and self-fund Ojai’s first theater festival to raise money for the high school. Which is why we were in a defunct school auditorium in Ojai where he was rehearsing with the actress Marin Ireland. But with all his recent travel, he barely had time to learn his lines. “Everybody’s been rehearsing,” he said, “and I’ve been on Jimmy Kimmel and Kelly Clarkson being an [expletive].”
Bernthal went straight from talking to me into a scene, in which he plays a mailman trying to convince his girlfriend to get into his car. He and Ireland ran the scene four times. Sometimes they made each other laugh. One time Bernthal cried. He ran at Ireland, and sometimes he pleaded. He tried to go big, he tried to go soft. He encouraged Ireland to hit him for real and to spit on him.
Ireland, a New York theater veteran, told me she has worked with actors who were so focused on their own performance that it sometimes felt as if they were looking at her forehead. With Bernthal, it was more collaborative, like playing tennis. “You’re trying to keep up, but you also feel like you want to be better,” she said, “and maybe actually are getting better because you’re playing with him.” Affleck, who admitted he doesn’t play tennis, invoked the same metaphor when describing acting opposite Bernthal. “I found Jon’s return, so to speak, of whatever I did was really interesting and asked a lot of me,” Affleck said, adding, “it wasn’t one of those experiences where you’re trying to dig you and your scene partner out of a hole.”
Scene-partner work is at the core of Stanislavsky’s system — a naturalistic acting style based on an actor’s personal experience — that radically changed American theater and film when it was introduced in the United States in the 1920s. “That’s the method,” Bernthal said. “It’s not like, ‘Call me George Washington.’” But Bernthal doesn’t identify as a method actor, a term that has become synonymous with never breaking character. “A lot of method people like to sing and dance and telegraph how far they’re going,” he said. “I don’t need to do that.” He recalled doing a scene with an actor known for this sort of thing who got so into his performance that he slammed a telephone down on Bernthal’s hand, nearly breaking it. “That ain’t it,” Bernthal said.
The next morning Bernthal played a weekly basketball game with other Ojai guys. On the court, he was the loudest. “No matter how many tree-bark steroids you take, you’re never going to get me, bro,” he teased a fellow player. Turning to the girlfriend of another guy who was playing aggressively, he asked, “Yo, are you not giving him enough attention?”
Bernthal wore sweatpants hiked to his calves and a hooded sweatshirt advertising his brother-in-law’s company, which provides testosterone-replacement therapy for men. Bernthal doesn’t touch that stuff, even though he knows it would help him bulk up for roles. “A lot of actors clearly do it and don’t talk about it,” he said. Bernthal generally finds modern revisions to masculinity paralyzing. He agrees that empathy is necessary, but he also thinks that a man should know how to defend himself. He has had all of his children learning jiu-jitsu from an early age. He taught his elder son, Henry, to box. They used to be best friends, he and Henry. But lately the 13-year-old has started to pull away, breaking Bernthal’s heart a little. “He’s doing something very natural,” he said, “but it kills me.” The boxing-glove pendant Bernthal wears, which I noticed him kiss a few times during rehearsal, is actually Henry’s.
Bernthal told me that he always feels a little uneasy talking about his past. “It makes me disgusted with myself,” he said, “because I think there’s a part of me that’s still this little boy that wants to say, ‘Look at how tough I am.’” He has mostly put that guy to bed. In 2010, when Bernthal was in depositions for that lawsuit and his wife was pregnant with Henry, he did a play called “Small Engine Repair,” a meditation on the working-class American male in crisis. The playwright, John Pollono, gave him a copy of “Townie,” a memoir by Andre Dubus III about violence, masculinity and finding redemption in art. That book has biblical meaning for Bernthal. The only time he wakes his former self up now is for his roles. “But it’s all under this umbrella of safety and work,” he said.
So much of Bernthal’s bravado was driven by fear and shame. He knows that now. If Bernthal has a method, it is tapping into that understanding. The tough guys he plays are more interesting than their stereotypes. They are often afraid. They suppress shame. They are petulant and defensive. Christopher Storer, the creator of FX’s “The Bear,” first saw Bernthal in Pollono’s play. “What a lot of people notice in his work is the physicality and toughness,” Storer told me. “But the moments I find most riveting are actually when he’s compliant.”
Years later, as Storer developed his show, he always imagined Bernthal as the prototype for the tormented Chicago sandwich-shop owner. But by the time he began casting in 2021, he assumed Bernthal wouldn’t be available for a single scene. Bernthal was then starring in “American Gigolo,” a Showtime series based on Paul Schrader’s 1980 film, which he now considers the biggest mistake of his career. He felt pressured into it by his agents, who nudged him toward the lead role. (The series ended up being mired in misconduct allegations, the showrunner was fired and Bernthal declined to return for a second season.) Storer ultimately offered to take the production to Los Angeles and shot the scene during Bernthal’s lunch break. In it, Bernthal’s character aggressively salts meat while telling a story about a wild night from his younger days, and it is tragic not because you know he’s dead but because he knows he has told the story a million times and yet he’s going to tell it anyway.
Bernthal’s ability to layer his characters in this way is also what appealed to David Simon and George Pelecanos when they cast him as Wayne Jenkins, the arrogant crooked cop in “We Own This City.” The pilot takes Jenkins from an opening monologue of incredible swagger to being cornered by interrogators like a frightened animal with its back raised. While the other disgraced officers look away from their police chief, Jenkins maintains stubborn eye contact. “Do you guys know who I am?” he asks. He is still posturing, and yet something in his face — the shakiness, the recognition — tells the viewer that the fortress of his macho identity is faltering into something small and pathetic. Simon read Chekhov’s plays when he first started working in TV. When I asked him about Bernthal’s training, he acknowledged the playwright’s influence in Bernthal’s portrayal of Jenkins as a man who is not honest with himself — and yet slowly reveals the truth to the audience. “I’d like to think the real Wayne Jenkins is as interesting as that performance,” Simon told me.
Bernthal is aware of the progress he has made, but there are still parts of his former self that he can’t quite give up. Often insisting on doing his own stunts, he has torn ligaments and one of his lats, broken his hand and slammed his head against the ground. He and his wife argue about it. As a boxer, Bernthal has already sustained too many head injuries, not to mention the time that someone broke a bar stool over his head at a wedding. But he can’t help it. That little boy is still in there, and he just really wants to show up all those actors who go on and on about their method. “Like, I’m tougher than all you guys, watch this,” he said. “But who wins that? Not my kids.” He couldn’t say much about “The Odyssey,” but he did go out of his way to tell me that he really wanted to prove himself to Nolan, whose productions have been described as physically demanding. “I wanted him to know there’s nothing he could do to break me,” he said. “And I think I made that pretty clear.”
Bernthal went from basketball into rehearsals. He tucked his hoodie into his sweatpants and pulled the waist high, transforming into a Stanley Kowalski-like figure. At his wardrobe fitting, Bernthal tried on a pair of mailman shorts, which he heard an actor who played the role before him refused to wear because they were emasculating. “Can you imagine caring about that?” Bernthal said. In a few weeks, the humble auditorium would be transformed into a black-box theater with metal folding chairs occupied by local residents as well as movie stars, including Bernthal’s “Odyssey” co-stars Tom Holland and Zendaya. Despite it being a small-town production, Bernthal told me he was nervous. “But also excited, like getting in the ring to spar somebody,” he said. “I’ll kiss my little necklace right before, and then it’s like, OK, let’s see what the fight is.”
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