There is an actor who plays a significant role both in The Odyssey and in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and it is not Tom Holland. Nor is it Zendaya. The pair of actors have starred in the cinematic summer, moving from photocall to photocall to promote these two highly anticipated releases, but there is a third person who, without attracting as much media attention as Tomdaya, has established himself as one of the essential faces of the season. This is Jon Bernthal (Washington D.C., 49 years old), the solemn Menelaus in Christopher Nolan’s film, the rough Punisher in Destin Cretton’s. “I love their relationship and I love seeing them together,” Bernthal confessed about his co-stars at the premiere of The Odyssey on July 14. “Beyond all the success he has, knowing he has someone who supports him and can love so intensely makes me very happy,” he responded in relation to Holland, whom he met more than a decade ago during auditions for their Marvel characters.
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More than 20 years of career have given Bernthal enough experience to skillfully dodge questions about his younger colleagues, instead of about himself. And yet his career is a bottomless pit of juicy stories. “He has had a really interesting life and I think actors who go through that are the most interesting to watch,” Matt Damon said to The Hollywood Reporter for the feature on Bernthal that graced its cover on July 16. “It turns out he is incredibly tough, something not common in Hollywood: there is a whole range of characters he can convincingly portray that others simply cannot, because he is really what others would wish to be,” Damon summarized.
The tough guy label that characterizes most of Bernthal’s characters has been forged in a thousand battles both on and off set. According to his IMDb page, he has broken his nose 14 times between street fights and especially violent shoots. “In The Punisher [the series about his Marvel universe character] I broke it again. So that makes 15,” he confessed laughing in a 2024 interview. In fiction, Bernthal has been fed up with giving and receiving punches in series like Daredevil, The Walking Dead, or The City Is Ours. In the latter, in fact, he plays a corrupt cop and, as he recounted in a podcast last year, he got an unexpected punch from an intruder who sneaked onto the set during a scene about the Black Lives Matter protests. “Suddenly a guy comes running at me and I think: ‘Who the hell is this clown?’. He threw a right hook and I felt my face cut. I thought: ‘If he’s going to punch me, I’ll punch him back’… So I returned the right hook,” he explained.
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In real life, the actor has not avoided problems either. Bernthal is the middle of three brothers. The eldest, Tom, is the founder and former CEO of the consulting agency Kelton Global —and husband of former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg—. The youngest, Nicholas, is an orthopedic oncologist and university professor at UCLA. Jon, according to The Guardian in a 2022 interview with the actor, “was the black sheep of the family, testing his parents in every possible way.” At eight years old, he was caught trafficking Playboy magazines at a camp, was almost expelled from school, and was always getting into fights. “I made many mistakes in my life and took quite a few paths from which I probably couldn’t have turned back. That said, throughout my life I grew up surrounded by an environment and a family that loved and supported me. There are many people who don’t have that,” he admitted to the British outlet.
Bernthal grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington D.C., but soon started hanging out with friends from more troubled neighborhoods. In high school, he was mugged on the subway and had his nose broken for the second time, so he began training in taekwondo and boxing to learn to defend himself. “I think Jon was very attracted to the thrill and pure testosterone, like: ‘The boys and I are going out and anything could happen tonight,’” his brother Nick described to The New York Times in 2025. “I always wanted to surround myself with the most dangerous people, explore the most dangerous corners of my city, and see how far I could go without getting caught. When you have super successful siblings, I think maybe I crossed the line to see if they would still love me even if I did that,” the actor himself confessed to the same newspaper in 2022.
Son of a renowned lawyer, he avoided jail on more than one occasion. His best-known anecdote in this regard happened in 2009, while walking his pitbull on Venice Beach. According to what he told Esquire in 2018, a drunk man started calling and grabbing the dog, and Bernthal stopped him. The man and some of his friends began following the actor to his home and ignored his warnings to stay away. “Bernthal turned around and punched him in the face. The man was unconscious before his head hit the ground,” details Esquire. An hour later, he was arrested at the police station. “If that guy doesn’t wake up, you’ll go to jail for life,” the police told him. Luckily, the guy woke up. Bernthal received a three-year probation sentence and a two-million-dollar civil lawsuit, which was eventually settled out of court. “I wish I could tell you that I was horrified thinking I might have ended someone’s life, but the scary thing is that at that moment it wasn’t even a strange night for me,” he confessed to The New York Times last year.
Despite his boxer appearance, Bernthal decided to channel his six-foot energy into baseball, and he was good enough to receive a scholarship at Skidmore College in New York. There his future was decided by chance. Or rather by mistake. He accidentally signed up for an advanced theater class instead of an easy course to earn credits, but after a heartbreaking improvisation about a son whose mother gives him a baseball glove on her deathbed, the teacher was so moved that she gave him the role of Roger Chillingworth in the school production of The Scarlet Letter. And he was fascinated. “I know that before discovering acting I was very lost and everyone was very worried about me. I had never before put all my energy, my grit, and my determination into anything, but when I discovered acting, I gave myself completely to it and it went very well,” he revealed to the American newspaper.
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The same teacher who discovered his talent advised him to audition for the Moscow Art Theatre and Bernthal nailed it. He moved to the Russian capital in 1999, shortly before the second Chechen war broke out and Vladimir Putin came to power. The bad boy from Washington then discovered what a true lawless city was. “I never saw such unrestrained cruelty and such complete and blatant disregard for the feelings of others,” he admitted in 2025. In Moscow, he continued playing baseball and was signed as a catcher on a Russian semi-professional league team. “That’s where the best baseball players gather. It goes totally unnoticed, but everyone moves to Russia,” he joked on Conan O’Brien’s show in 2014.
Still, where he really toughened up was in acting classes. “The theater was like a military school for Bernthal. His teachers had staged unauthorized plays during the Soviet era, risking jail and the gulag. Theater represented a real danger, true anarchy,” The New York Times described that period. The training included daily acting and concentration exercises, but also acrobatics and ballet, and students who did not meet the standards were systematically expelled from the program. “It was a very intense and masculine way of approaching art with which I felt very identified,” the actor confessed. In 2000, his performance in The Bear, by Chekhov, attracted the attention of a Harvard talent scout and, two years later, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the prestigious American university.
Interestingly, his brief—but omnipresent—role in a series with the same name as the Russian playwright’s work, The Bear, earned Bernthal an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in 2024. “There are no words to express how grateful I am for The Bear. For being part of it, for being able to watch it, and simply for the fact that it exists. It is personal without being pretentious, sacred without being moralistic, and elegant without falling into self-indulgence,” he wrote on his Instagram profile—with five million followers—after learning the news.
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“If you talk to people who knew me when I was young, they would say: ‘This guy wasn’t going to make it.’ But I found this [acting]. I have dedicated all my effort to it and I am living a dream,” Bernthal admitted to The Guardian. He says there is no chance of falling back into old habits. After the incident that almost cost him his freedom in 2009, the actor went to therapy, attended anger management courses. In interviews, he often mentions how eternally grateful he is to the theater teacher who changed his life, but he also always remembers how his wife, Erin Angle, straightened out his path.
The actor and the nurse have been married since 2010 and have three children together: Henry (15 years old), Billy (13), and Adeline (11). “My life consists of my wife, my children, and my work. I am able to take all that energy and all that danger and channel it into my work. And I am very grateful for that because I know how badly things could have gone. I can say with my head held high that now I am safe from that. I know how to create danger, but I know how to do it in a completely healthy way,” he revealed to the British outlet.
Among his upcoming projects, only one title is still in pre-production phase, the action comedy Snow Ponies. Lacking more details, the synopsis previews: “A group of tough men scare away…”. No need to read further to know that Bernthal fits the bill perfectly.
