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Interview: Jon Bernthal Talks Sweet Virginia, Pilgrimage, & More

Among our topics of conversation is why Frank Darabont sees him as a latter-day John Garfield.

Interview: Jon Bernthal Talks Sweet Virginia, Pilgrimage, & More
Photo: Tribeca Film Festival

Thanks in part to his hard body, soft eyes, and a formerly broken nose that gives him almost as distinctive a profile as Javier Bardem’s, Jon Bernthal has played a lot of cops and ethnic roles, many of them alpha males, though he’s been offered a bit more variety of parts since his breakout role as Rick Grimes’s best friend turned rival, Shane Walsh, on AMC’s The Walking Dead.

I met with Bernthal this week at a Tribeca hotel, where he was promoting two of his latest films, both of which are playing in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. In Jamie M. Dagg’s neo-noir Sweet Virginia, Bernthal plays Sam, a hotel manager in a sleepy town who’s forced into action when a killer comes to town. He plays another reluctant hero in Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage, a grim tale of a group of 12th-century monks enlisted to bring the Pope a sacred relic they have been safeguarding, who embark on their perilous journey under the protection of Bernthal’s mute former soldier.

Polite, sincere, and prone to searching for just the right word, Bernthal seemed a bit younger and more diffident in person than he does on screen. We talked about studying theater in Moscow, the surrogate-father bond Sam forms with a young woman that was his favorite relationship in Sweet Virginia, and why Frank Darabont and I see him as a latter-day John Garfield.

You’ve worked pretty steadily since you started acting professionally. Does it feel that way to you or was it was a struggle for a while?

It feels like it was struggle for a while. I think maybe since The Walking Dead I’ve not had to [struggle]. And I enjoy that. I’m not trying to give, like, a cheese-dick answer, but I really think that the minute it stops feeling like something you’re striving for is the minute it loses purpose and goes wayward and in effect it kind of dies. I studied in Moscow, and the symbol of the Moscow Art Theatre is the seagull. [Chekhov’s] The Seagull is all about people in relationship with their dreams, and I think that the reason why Chekhov used the seagull is that a dream should be out in front of you. You should be chasing it; it should be alive. I think the only way to attain it, to touch it, is to shoot it out of the sky. There’s no such thing as a pet seagull.

How did you wind up studying acting in Russia? And what was it like?

It was great for me. I was an athlete growing up, football and baseball, and all kinds of sports, and I went to college to play baseball. I met this amazing theater teacher there, Alma Becker, who came out of the San Francisco theater scene in the ’60s—just a magical woman. She saw something in me, put me in my first play. She was fascinated with East European and Russian theater. This was back in the late ’90s. I was just kind of getting into trouble and things weren’t really working out for me. I went to her and asked her what I should do, and she said, “Go to Moscow. Try to get into this program.”

So what was going on in Eastern European and Russian theater at the time?

I think, for one, [Alma] wanted me to be in a place that held theater and held acting in such a reverent kind of place. For a kid who was getting in trouble a bunch, dealing with my masculinity, going to a place where it was unbelievably rigorous, unbelievably disciplined. To be an actor there is a very strong profession. It’s not like here, where you can just sort of be: “I’m an actor! I want to be famous!” There, you’ve got to be accepted into this school and then you’ve got to learn ballet, you’ve got to learn acrobatics, you’ve got to learn different languages, you’ve got to learn all kinds of things. And they’ll take 100 kids and cut the class in half every year. It really saved my life. For a kid who kind of lacked reverence, for lack of a better word, or who lacked any kind of spirituality at that point, who was just kind of very instinctual, it was a very special thing for me. I know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Alma and if it wasn’t for that decision. And Moscow was an incredibly wild place for a kid who really hadn’t been out of the country.

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Gangsters, right? And the economy was changing fast, getting more capitalistic?

It was the wild west. There were shootouts at the Duma. The Chechens had been blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow. There’s a brutality and a vitality to life there that was unlike anything I’d ever seen. For a guy who thought he was pretty tough coming out of Washington D.C., it was a really eye-opening experience to go live there, and live there on my own. I didn’t have an email account, I didn’t call, I had no contact with my family and my friends. Best thing that ever happened to me.

But with that brutality, on every street corner there’s a statue of a playwright or a poet or a painter. The arts are just revered there. Especially Russian arts. You get on the subway and people are reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy; they’re not reading Us Weekly. And if you’re going to talk to someone there, there’s no pretense. It’s not uncommon, in a first conversation with somebody, for that person to break down in tears or laugh hysterically.

Your character in Sweet Virginia has a lovely, fatherly relationship with a young woman he works with.

Yeah, [actress] Odessa [Young].

Does having a daughter of your own make it easier—or maybe harder—to play a father to a young woman?

I think just having kids in general—I have three young kids—has changed everything for me in like every way across the board. I hang out with a bunch of young actors, and they all share this concern, whether they voice it or not: “When I stop torturing myself, when I stop pushing the envelope, will I still be able to bring what we bring?” It’s something I’ve talked to so many of them about, and I worried about it too when I was young. I’m lucky that I am alive and I was never in prison, but I have lived a very, very full life. I’ve gone through many things. Things that are…

Risky? Dangerous?

Yeah. The worry is, as an artist, that once you go in another direction, are you going to have access to the dangerous parts of yourself? But for me, the process of becoming a father and being a husband has made me more of a complete man. I’ve found so much peace in my life that I can focus the work much better. Well, whether I’m better or not, that’s up to other people, but I feel much stronger about the work. I feel more energized, more confident. I feel I have more to say, and my love goes so much past myself now. I don’t give a fuck about myself now. The only time I think about myself is in relation to [my family]. I put my name on something, that’s their name. And they’re going to look at that some day and say, “Daddy was here and he did that,” so it better goddamn be fucking worth it. You just love so much stronger.

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And yeah, Odessa’s role isn’t giant in this script, but meeting her as an actor and working with her is one of the most exciting actor relationships that I’ve made in a very long time. I think she’s enormously special. What she did, she makes it look easy, but it’s not. At 19 years old, to be able to have that kind of banter. Also, she’s Australian, and to be able to improvise like that and to stay so true to character and not be self-indulgent at all—she’s so streamlined and so smart and so brave and so bold. I can’t wait to work with her on something else. That’s my favorite relationship in the film. In the script, it wasn’t necessarily clear that they were going to be as close as they were.

Was she in that last scene?

No, she wasn’t. But [director] Jamie Dagg and all of us, we loved what was going on with us. There was a whole other character who was supposed to inhabit that, an older woman who worked at the hotel. But James shot the scenes with Odessa. We had an idea about what if we did this, just to add to the tension at the end. There’s a lot of liberties like that with the script that made it in, that I’m super-grateful to Jamie for.

In all honesty, we could have even explored that relationship a little further, to deal with why he deals with this guy the way he does. Because there’s this whole thing of [the killer saying] “Just let me go, Sam. Just let me go and I’ll get out of your life.” But there’s another element. I have this girl, this kind of daughter, that I’ve got to protect.

You’ve made a lot of references to having a rough life when you were young, but your dad is a lawyer and one of your brothers is a doctor—

Great surgeon. Yeah.

So are you the black sheep of your family?

I was. There’s no question. I definitely would not classify my upbringing as rough. I wasn’t thrust into anything. D.C. was D.C. in the late ’80s and ’90s—it was a rough city—but I always had a nose for [trouble]. I searched it out.

You went to Sidwell Friends, right?

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Yeah. One of the great things about that school was that Sidwell, back in the pre-Clinton years—I think they would say that it’s still this way, and maybe they’ll never talk to me again for saying this—but diversity was really at the core of that school. Not just racial diversity or socioeconomic diversity but behavioral diversity. There were kids who’d been kicked out of other schools who were allowed to come there for a second chance, kids who’d been in huge problems with the D.C. public school system. And they were taught—and I witnessed it—that through love and acceptance and a family-like atmosphere, you can find God in everyone, which is the Quaker philosophy. I grew up with kids who got shot and killed. I grew up with kids who shot and killed people. But within the halls of that school, they were part of a community that really, really worked. It was a really beautiful, special thing. And that’s the kind of home I was raised in too. My parents are foster parents. We had all kinds of kids coming through our house. I’m so grateful for that. I always had a nose for trouble, and that was where my sense of adventure led me. It was self-inflicted. It was not through lack of love, or lack of…

Opportunity?

Not lack of opportunity. Absolutely not.

Your career kind of reminds me of John Garfield’s. Are you familiar with him?

Look, obviously, I know who he is, I’ve seen some of his films, but…

There’s a kind of sexy but vulnerable tough-guy thing going on with you both. He didn’t play as many cops as you, but he also played lots of hard guys whose toughness was clearly a shield to protect them from being hurt, or good guys who were capable of being tough.

Frank Darabont, when he left Walking Dead, I went and did Mob City with him, that’s what he talked to me about all the time. He was like, “You’re John Garfield.” And I tend to trust anything he said.

No kidding? I never knew he saw that similarity too.

Well, he would just say it privately, to me.

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Do you think those qualities are things other people read into you, so those are the kinds of roles you get offered, or is there something in there that you gravitate toward, for whatever reason?

I think a little bit of each. I try to both go after and build characters that are completely unique and different, like I did in David Simon’s series Show Me a Hero, where I got to play a lawyer. His sort of bravery comes with a totally different set of tactics, and it’s a different color. But Hollywood can be an unbelievably uncreative place. People say, “I’ve seen him do that. I know he can do that.” But to then convince them that you can do something else.

To be honest, that’s one of the reasons why I really wanted to do Sweet Virginia. This role was written for a guy in his 60s. When they came to me, I said, “Guys, I really love this, and I love the character, but the whole thing is that he is kind of giving up a little bit and breaking down a little bit. That’s vital and integral to the character. I’m not sure that’s me. It’s very interesting to go into a movie saying, “I love this, but I’m really not the right guy.” [laughs]

But Jamie gave me the opportunity to try how you could incorporate that into a man in his late 30s. That’s where the hint of [Sam’s] Parkinson’s came in, with the shakes. In the script, there’s a scene with the loud neighbor [a resident of the hotel Sam manages], I was supposed to go beat the shit out of him. And I suggested, “How about if he beats the shit out of me?” Sam isn’t a foot-forward guy. A lot of the guys that I play, they’re not necessarily all hotheaded guys who just charge [into a situation], but they’re all forward-leaning guys. I really loved the fact that this guy wasn’t that. He was very much searching for quiet, searching to not engage.

It seems like maybe he’s more like you than most of the characters you play, in that he’s kind of self-effacing and has a sense of humor, and he’s essentially a family man, a guy who can fight if he’s pushed to the wall but who would rather not.

Yeah. I think there’s bits of me in all of them. But I think, yeah.

What attracted you to the Shane character in The Walking Dead?

The script just blew me away. It was the best pilot script I’d ever read. I’d just tested for a role where I would have been a regular on one of those big franchise network shows that would have had me forever—I would have still been doing it right now. Tons of money. But I couldn’t accept the job until I got a chance to audition for Walking Dead, because I just loved the script so much.

So it wasn’t the character per se but just the show as a whole that drew you in?

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It was that character. We all had to audition for Rick first, and then Frank mixed and matched everyone for Rick and Shane. I just knew 100% that that Shane role [was for me], [from] that initial monologue that he opens with, about women and why they can’t turn off the lights, and how he’s using humor to sort of reach his friend and get his friend to talk, which is the very core issue that he has with his wife, that he doesn’t talk. It was such a caring, loving thing. And to know that the arc of that character is that he would then sleep with that man’s wife. He clearly loves this man, but he’s clearly going to fall in love with her, and to have to deal with that, and then to have to eventually try to kill his best friend. I just thought, wow, you can really push it to the envelope of torment and fury, but at the end of the day he’s got a good heart. If you can do that, and have a beginning, middle and end, and have, like, buoys along the way to reach—he’s gotta do this by this, this by this—it’s just a great, great opportunity. And then Walking Dead became as successful as it did. Nobody thought it was going to do that! But it was just one of those jobs where, the more people you met, the more you read of Frank’s writing, the more you got to down there, you just knew: This is so special. And there was so much love. Andy Lincoln is, I think, the best lead on television.

You’re a method actor, so you like to get into character ahead of time and on the set. How did you prepare to play a mute in Pilgrimage?

I went for the first few weeks there not speaking. We were in a small town in western Ireland. It wasn’t even a town. We all lived at an outpost in the middle of nowhere. It was 30 miles from any town, no electronics, no anything. So we were just basically on set every day, which is like the 12th century.

At first, you realize that the first thing you give up when you stop talking is your wants and needs. Because if you want someone to pass you a glass of water or you want a coat, the first thing that happens is [you think], “Okay, maybe I don’t need it so bad.” And then the next thing is, “Maybe I don’t deserve it.” But it ended up not being great for the film, because you have to create a dialogue with the director and I lost all communication with the director. [laughs] So eventually we turned it off and I started talking again.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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