A few weeks into production on The Odyssey, the time had come for the epic Trojan Horse sequence — the one that, as legend has it, saw the Greeks secretly invading the city of Troy and ultimately winning the war. In the film, it begins with Odysseus (Matt Damon) and more than a dozen of his allies, including King of Sparta Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), hiding inside the giant wooden steed. They’re crammed together, silent and patient and ready to explode — and because this is a Christopher Nolan movie, the actors shot it full-tilt, every drop of anxiety and discomfort getting squeezed out for the camera within the horse’s confines.

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The scene is staged so that the horse is partially submerged in water. Bernthal drew the short straw of the cast, so he was the one treading neck-deep. The water was supposed to be heated; when cameras began rolling in the Moroccan desert, it was ice cold. Within a few minutes, Bernthal was shivering. Even though Nolan is famously averse to the cozy comforts and shortcuts one might find on other movie sets, he suggested pulling his actor out.

But Bernthal refused. He screamed, “You ain’t breaking me, Chris. There’s nothing you can do to break me.” So Nolan kept filming, and kept filming.

For what he has called the hardest shoot of his life, Damon says The Odyssey would not be the movie it became if he and his co-stars hadn’t witnessed Bernthal in action, refusing to surrender to the elements, at the start of their long journey together. “That was the first example of somebody pushing past what they thought they could do. Nobody in that horse was ever going to complain for the next five months about anything because of what we saw,” Damon says. “It set the tone for the rest of us and how we needed to show up for each other and for the movie.”

Bernthal’s collaborators from across his 25-year screen career will not be surprised to hear this. The D.C. native made his name in small but impactful parts for the likes of Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street), Denis Villeneuve (Sicario), James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari) and Ava DuVernay (Origin) by digging deep — no matter the size, no matter the cost.

“There was always another level to go to, another level to unpack. And he just kept working it and working it all the way through production with whatever time I could give him,” says Nolan. “He really wants to know that he’s lifted every rock. He examines every possibility for the character and what he could bring to it.”

Bernthal’s steady rise has culminated in an explosive 2026. His year began with the January limited series His & Hers, a juicy mystery co-starring Tessa Thompson that now ranks as the 10th most popular Netflix show of all time. He both co-wrote and starred in special installments of The Bear (“Gary”) and The Punisher (“One Last Kill”), series vehicles that have earned him, respectively, an Emmy Award and the Marvel seal of approval. To that latter point: The Odyssey’s release on Friday comes ahead of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (out July 31), in which Bernthal will debut his gravelly voiced antihero in an MCU movie after a decade of playing him in various TV shows.

Oh, right, and this past Sunday, Bernthal wrapped his four-month run in Dog Day Afternoon, where he made his Broadway debut, without missing a single show.

“The world, now especially, is so fraught with ‘You don’t want to be embarrassed,’ ‘You don’t want to strike out,’ ‘You don’t want to get too many nos,’ ‘You don’t want to be rejected,’” says Bernthal. “And God do I think that’s a mistake. That is the opposite of living. Go bold. Embarrass the fuck out of yourself. Look for nos. Look for people to reject you.”

***

That nonstop intensity takes a toll. The first time I meet with Bernthal, he seems a little worn out. It’s a hot, muggy June afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, and he’s waving me into the stage door of the August Wilson Theatre, where he’ll perform a Dog Day show mere hours from now. He closes the door behind me as I walk in, and we ascend a rickety staircase in near pitch-black darkness. “The lights are out,” he laments while adjusting his baseball cap. “There’s just no electricity.”

We head to his dressing room, where the power — and, mercifully, the window unit AC — is still on. The room is lined with photos of his mentors and family and a framed still of Al Pacino in the Dog Day Afternoon movie, the iconic role he’s boldly taking on. He spends this time of the day religiously brewing cup after cup of tea with his electric kettle, sucking on lozenge after lozenge.

Bernthal’s fiery performance — teary and loud, melancholy and swaggering — would take a lot out of any actor. I ask him what an afternoon on a show day looks like for him at this point, a few months into the run. Is he settled? He sighs, takes a moment to answer. “I didn’t really know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this,” he says.

While a commercial success from the outset, the stage adaptation of Sidney Lumet’s blazing film drew mixed reviews from critics and received no top honors at the Tony Awards, despite the impressive cast toplined by Bernthal and featuring his frequent collaborator Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Broadway stalwart Jessica Hecht. The New York Times also reported on clashes between the playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, who was briefly kept out of rehearsals, and Mark Kaufman, a lead producer through Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures. Bernthal confirms that behind-the-scenes tensions resulted in a less successful play than he’d hoped for.

“The heart of it is so strong and so pure and so great, and unfortunately insecurity and rigidity got in the way of it realizing its fullest potential — and that makes me sad,” he says. “I’m not sure that this is the best version of this story. A lot of promises were made about changes to the script that didn’t really happen. It was quite tumultuous. I did see a lot of ego. It was not a highly collaborative process.”

He makes sure to add: “The one thing that I can say is that I went into it giving absolutely everything that I have. I still do every day.”

Broadway represented a dream, a culmination point, for Bernthal, who credits acting and the theater with saving his life. Growing up with a lawyer father and social-worker mother, he was in trouble constantly as a kid, picking schoolyard fights and, one time, getting sent home from camp for trafficking Playboy magazines. He describes his younger self as a suburban kid in search of danger. Looking back, he sees that he was on a bad path.

Then he accidentally signed up for an acting class in college, where he was mostly focused on athletics, and caught the bug. His teacher, Alma Becker, inspired him to pursue acting as a profession and “sent me to Russia,” as Bernthal puts it — specifically, to the Moscow Art Theatre. It might seem an odd choice. But the rigor and discipline demanded by that particular program meshed perfectly with his determination to push past his own limits and explore his red-hot emotions.

In Moscow, Bernthal embraced a deeply collaborative, military-grade artistic training ground. “You’re a soldier for the story, you’re a soldier for your higher-up,” he says. “If you say, ‘Jump,’ I’m up in the air — and then I ask you how high.”

The chaotic Dog Day process did not offer such a fruitful, productive dynamic. Hecht, an invaluable sounding board, would tell Bernthal, “I promise you, honey, it’s not usually like this.” Bernthal has at least remained excited to show a new side of himself through the character of Sonny Amato, a desperate bank robber also navigating a complex queer romance: “To be a part of a love story that looks like this, that’s so pure — it is such a thrill and such an honor for me.”

He’s preparing to take some time off with his wife and three children once he wraps. They are based in Ojai, California, though the family moved to D.C. for the year to stay close to Bernthal. He sees them every week, but the separation has taken its own toll. And he’d still return to Broadway in a second — with one caveat: “It’s got to be the right one, with the right folks.”

It’s not the first time Bernthal has had to learn that lesson.

***

When Bernthal came to Hollywood, he worried he didn’t belong. He’d sit around audition waiting rooms for soap operas and compare himself to the “beautiful men” up for the same roles. He knew he didn’t look like those guys, could feel that those jobs would not go his way. “The idea of me being sexy is the most absurd to me,” he deadpans. He’d have to work differently. In early projects, Bernthal honed his tough-guy persona, first breaking out as a merciless survivalist in The Walking Dead. He brought a gritty vulnerability to these parts because he knew them in his bones.

A year before The Walking Dead premiered, Bernthal punched out a drunk man who grabbed his dog and later followed him home in Los Angeles. While the man survived, he was knocked unconscious as his head hit the pavement. “It was literally as profound and clear a moment as I’ve ever had,” Bernthal said last year on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. All he’d worked toward could’ve gone away in a moment. He realized he needed to take control of his life for good.

“He’s led a really interesting life, and I find actors for whom that’s the case always are the most interesting to watch,” says Damon. “He happens to be incredibly tough, which is not often the case in Hollywood — there’s a range of characters he can play convincingly that others just can’t, because he really is the thing that other people wish they were.”

Lena Dunham, a friend of Bernthal’s who directed him in 2022’s Sharp Stick, adds, “Jon is the favorite actor of plenty of tough guys — walking down the street with him, you see these guys who are usually exuding intimidation just go soft. He means so much to them and they get very cute when they catch him in the wild.” That speaks to the unique complexity of the actor, who brings more nuance than first meets the eye: “People share with him almost compulsively because they can feel his genuine interest and his profound lack of judgment.”

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That famed toughness has extended to casting offices. Bernthal is known for giving an audition everything he’s got. In 2013, he went out for David Ayer’s Fury, a visceral film centered on an American tank crew near the end of World War II and starring Brad Pitt. Bernthal felt intimidated going up for the role, an unstable ammunition loader paralyzed by trauma, but the task became clear: “It was, ‘Brad doesn’t know you. You’ve got to prove it to Brad,’” Bernthal says. “That was an insane morning. I was ready to die.”

What does Bernthal mean by that? He pours a fresh cup of tea. “The one thing that was going to be unquestioned after that morning was that no one was going to care more or work harder than me. No one was going to go to a more dangerous place than me. David and Brad both felt that in the room,” he says. “I left it absolutely all on the field, and it was a scary experience.”

Scary for him — or for them? Bernthal flips his cap backward and says, “I think probably for them.” He takes another sip. “I did what was needed.” He got the part.

More recently, Bernthal has proven his range with warmer turns in King Richard and Origin, bringing a softness that extends off-camera. “I experienced a man who saw his job on the film as one of service to the story, to the director, to the crew,” says Origin star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. “I felt cared for by Jon. I felt challenged by Jon because of his keen intelligence about acting and the world we live in.”

He’s also felt an increasing need to tell his own stories. He’s spent over a decade developing a TV series called The Bottoms, based on extensive time he’d spent in Shreveport, Louisiana. A high-profile writer was hired to write the script several years ago, but he didn’t fully engage with the community as Bernthal had, leading to a draft that didn’t satisfy. So Bernthal paid out the writer’s fee to retain the rights and script it himself: “My agents thought I was out of my mind, but I was like, ‘I want to do this on my own now.’ And that’s what I did.”

It changed the way Bernthal saw himself in Hollywood’s creative ecosystem. Briefly set up at Amazon, The Bottoms is now in active development with FX — largely thanks to his second-ever screenwriting credit on “Gary,” the well-received Bear prequel episode (co-written with Moss-Bachrach, who also stars with Bernthal) that premiered on Hulu in May. “They’re like, ‘OK, now we’re looking at you as a creator,’” Bernthal says.

His first screenwriting credit, meanwhile, arrived only weeks earlier via The Punisher: One Last Kill. This journey also goes back a decade or so.

In 2015, Bernthal met Tom Holland on the set of Pilgrimage, a medieval Irish drama. During that spring shoot, a strange thing happened: Bernthal was contacted by Marvel about playing Frank “The Punisher” Castle at the same time Holland was up for the new Spider-Man. They wound up starring in each other’s audition tapes. “In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like Tom’s belief in himself, the health of his attitude toward it,” Bernthal says. “He wasn’t lying to himself. There was no fucking stopping this guy.”

Holland credits Bernthal with getting his take on Spider-Man to where it needed to be. “He encouraged me to show off,” Holland says. “I was playing it very much down the middle, and he told me to start the audition with a backflip and then do a somersault out of the camera angle — all that sort of stuff.” As for The Punisher, Bernthal wasn’t sure about joining the Marvel machine at all. “It was Tom who was like, ‘You’ve got to audition for this. You’ve got to make a tape for this,’” Bernthal says. “He explained to me who the Punisher was.”

The rest is history: Bernthal led his own Punisher TV series, to say nothing of his appearances on two separate Daredevil shows. But his reservations were not unfounded; the ride has not exactly been smooth. Commissioned as a Daredevil spinoff, The Punisher aired for two seasons on Netflix to mixed reviews before its cancellation. Years later, Frank Castle was set to be revived in the Disney+ reboot Daredevil: Born Again, but Bernthal walked away due to the creative direction. When production then stopped midway through season one due to the 2023 guild strikes, showrunners Chris Ord and Matt Corman departed. As is his wont, Bernthal seized that opportunity. “I didn’t like what they had for Frank at all,” he says. “Ultimately they gave me something that they let me rework and rewrite — and they aired that. It worked for them.”

This led straight into One Last Kill, which Bernthal co-wrote with filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green, who’s directed some of his best performances in King Richard and HBO’s We Own This City. The stark, brutal stand-alone was the result of “five years of negotiating and navigating, of not doing a lighter version that maybe they wanted,” Bernthal says. “I insisted that I had to be the creative force behind it.”

And now this saga will come full circle, as Bernthal’s Punisher and Holland’s Spidey converge in Brand New Day. In close collaboration with Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton, Bernthal maintained his seat at the table. They rehearsed on set as if on a more indie-scaled production.

The film’s story, of a loner Peter Parker leaning on his crime-fighting rival for help, evolved dramatically. “It was a very organic process. What was on the page ultimately ended up changing a lot because of what happened just naturally on set,” Holland says. “Because of that, we got such an amazing relationship between Spider-Man and the Punisher.” A hard-earned brotherly dynamic emerges between the characters. In one scene, Bernthal’s Frank notices some tension between Spidey and his love interest, MJ, played by Holland’s real-life wife, Zendaya. Bernthal says the moment allows the two men to connect in a surprising way.

“Frank is purpose-driven, mission-driven, ‘leave me the fuck alone’ — and I love when there are little cracks in that,” Bernthal says. Frank plays an unusual mentor role here by recognizing Peter’s warped state of mind: “He’s like, ‘Why are you being a dick to her? Don’t do that — that’s what I do.’ To see himself in this and then be a little bit protective like, ‘You’re trying to do the whole dark thing, don’t do that shit, I do that shit, it’s not fun, do your shit’ — I love that, and I really buy that.”

***

Cap backward, black hoodie, printed-out photos of Bernthal’s teachers from Russia and his family — it’s been a month since our first conversation, and at first glance through the laptop Zoom window, not much feels different. But there’s one very notable distinction: Bernthal is all but beaming on camera.

We’re a few hours out from the first in the final week of performances for Dog Day Afternoon. Have things changed since last we spoke? “I’m so glad you asked,” Bernthal says. “I’m really proud of Ebon and I, man — I’m really proud of us.” He says the play is “vastly different,” stronger and better than even a month ago.

This experience was difficult, not what Bernthal was dreaming of. But he’s emphatic that sticking with it, that giving it his all, was worth it. “I’m really ready for it to be done,” Bernthal says with a laugh. “But I’m also really excited for this week — leaving every single bit of myself on the stage.”

We’ve reconvened after my screening of The Odyssey, in which Bernthal — surprise! — makes a meal of his handful of scenes. The bulk of his screen time is once again with Holland, who portrays Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, as he nervously seeks out Menelaus for news of his father’s fate after the war. Bernthal’s big scene is set at a banquet, with Menelaus sitting between his wife, a stoic Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o), and Telemachus. The set piece builds toward the kind of expression of barely concealed rage and pain that Bernthal has plenty of experience with.

Menelaus’ outburst in this scene highlights the state of his broken marriage. Bernthal says, “Lupita and I wanted to dig into the wound of, how can we take these epic characters in this epic scene, in this unbelievably grand setting, and show the festering rot of a relationship that is so unbelievably relatable to a modern audience — and to people who are in very complicated relationships everywhere?”

Commentators like Elon Musk and Matt Walsh have baselessly claimed on X that Oscar winner Nyong’o, who’s toplined box office hits like Us and A Quiet Place: Day One, was cast because of her race, setting off a wide “woke” backlash to The Odyssey on the internet’s far right. “I haven’t read any of that stuff — I’ve heard rumblings of it — and for me, it’s like, we’re making comments about a movie that people haven’t seen. It’s crazy,” Bernthal says. “Besides being unparalleled in her beauty, Lupita is able to convey so much through so little. I’m just so glad it was her, and I can’t imagine anybody else playing that part.”

He and Nyong’o came in aware of the need to deliver for a master filmmaker. Bernthal knows that feeling well. But he’s also learned from moments of not delivering.

In the late 2000s, he auditioned for Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, and Mann said to him, “You’ve got a great look, but if Robert De Niro were here, he’d hit you with an acting bat because you’re just a terrible actor.” At the time, Bernthal felt crushed. Does an experience like that stay with him?

Bernthal shakes his head — and then recites Mann’s blistering quote for me almost exactly as he did in 2018 to Esquire. “So clearly, it stayed with me,” he cracks. For the record, Mann subsequently tapped Bernthal to star in a Vietnam War project that didn’t move forward. “He offered me a TV series, to be the lead,” Bernthal says. “So I’ve gotten to know Michael since then.”

The painful memory appears to move Bernthal as we wind down our time together. It speaks to his larger philosophy about acting, about putting himself out there, about taking charge of his own fate. “I’m capable of being shitty, dude, but I want to be a home-run hitter — I want to take big swings, I don’t want to ever be afraid of striking out, I don’t want to play it safe,” he says. “I don’t want to inch toward the truth without going too far because I don’t want to go too big. Fuck that. I want to give you everything.”

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