Jon Bernthal Is Bursting With So Much Main Character Energy That His Character Actor Days Are Behind Him

Apparently it’s Jon Bernthal season on your Disney+ account. In the space of a week, Bernthal has starred in Gary, a surprise-drop, one-off episode of The Bear, which he also co-wrote; and a long-planned one-off Marvel special, The Punisher: One Last Kill, which his MCU character’s gap between his appearance on the previous season of Daredevil: Born Again and an upcoming movie. These two Bernthal-centric hours are bookended by his starring role in the limited series His & Hers, on Netflix; and his appearances in The Odyssey and that forthcoming MCU movie, Spider-Man: Brand New Day. They’re both odds-on favorites to become the two biggest movies of the summer. Oh, and while all this has been going down, he’s been doing eight shows a week in Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway, with his Gary co-star and co-writer Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

Moss-Bachrach seems to be Bernthal’s creative soulmate; they also co-starred in the Punisher series that ran on Netflix for two seasons, sandwiched between Bernthal’s stints on The Walking Dead and The Bear. The man likes to work. He’s been in movies for nearly 25 years, he’s done multiple episodes of over a dozen TV series, and though Dog Day is his Broadway debut, he spent much of the 2000s doing regional theater. Remarkably, he’s maintained some That Guy character-actor energy while becoming more of a leading-man name-brand than most who share that sort of title – in a way that even Moss-Bachrach, with a similarly lengthy filmography including a Marvel summer blockbuster, has not.

Bernthal’s own Marvel character occupies particularly enviable, maybe now-impossible terrain. The Punisher, also known as Frank Castle, is very much a Main Guy Superhero, in that he has starred in a two-season series and repeatedly guested on another, where he interacts with Daredevil – OK, not the A-list, but the Punisher has often been a weird fit for more overtly fantastical beings anyway. He’s enough a part of Marvel’s New York that he’s finally turning up on the big screen this summer, with some kind of role (cameo? Genuine supporting part?) in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, likely to be the most-watched superhero movie since Deadpool & Wolverine. Yet it’s the Punisher’s separation from that more fantastical broader world, the fact that the name Frank Castle rarely comes up when rumors about the new massive Avengers all-in swirl, that allows him to make that Punisher corner of the Marvel fanbase his own. He’s one of the only big MCU performers who hasn’t been subsequently sucked into other big-budget fantasies; he clearly relishes the tortured, ground-level superheroics of the morally compromised Castle.

He’s also unafraid to show the work a bit. On Broadway, in a part made famous by Al Pacino, Bernthal’s actorly self-consciousness starts to sweat through his clothes. He’s still enormously charismatic, commanding the stage forcefully even when his character reveals a stealth sensitivity. But the material, reconfigured for the stage, is ultimately too strenuous; it works him over and wrings him out more than his Punisher shows, which are the exact opposite of burdened by the role’s history. (Previous luminaries to play Frank Castle include Dolph Lundgren in a film that went to straight-to-video in the United States, and Thomas Jane briefly rebranded as “Tom.”)

His presence in Dog Day also underlines what might be missing from the Bernthal mythos: The kind of slammer part his Pacino/De Niro/Hackman predecessors had for directors like Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. (He did play a small part in Wolf of Wall Street, but between DiCaprio, Hill, McConaughey, Margot Robbie, and Rob Reiner, who could get a word in edgewise?) Bernthal has worked with some strong filmmakers, often in character parts: He’s in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and Steve McQueen’s underseen Widows. They’re both terrific, but they’re well within his crime-movie wheelhouse. Though she’s no one’s first thought when picturing a modern-day Scorsese, I’d like to see Bernthal in another part more like what he did in Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick, a strange, tender, yet unsparing movie where he plays a philandering husband who provides a life-changing sexual experience for a naïve young woman almost in spite of his man-boy haplessness. (Dunham plays his pregnant wife, and she’s hilarious in it.)

That’s not far removed from the cop he plays in His & Hers, a “limited series” that is, at its heart, a Hitchcock-style wrong-man-and-woman thriller, with the added mystery of not being absolutely sure (unlike most Hitchcock stories) that neither Bernthal nor his estranged wife played by Tessa Thompson is innocent. The series ultimately skews more toward that streaming-crime sensibility, where battered paperbacks are glossed up for binge-watching, than the craft (or subtext) of a Hitchcock thriller – but it’s clear Bernthal could play an updated version of those parts. (So long as he’s allowed to do a slight accent; the man loves his little vocal shifts.) He could be a great match for a movie from Karyn Kusama – how is he not in Destroyer? – or David Gordon Green or, of course, Michael Mann, though maybe doing Ford v. Ferrari for James Mangold counts. But one of the reasons Bernthal seems particularly free and flexible, able to keep playing the Punisher while doing his best Pacino and writing his own Bear episodes, is that he seems genuinely uninterested in finding out what the next salary bracket might look like. No wonder he sometimes shows his work; he’s got a lot of it to show.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Gary on Disney+