By the time this year is over, Jon Bernthal will have starred in five movies released in 2021, acting opposite the likes of Angelina Jolie, Will Smith, and Sandra Bullock while enjoying some of the best reviews of his career. It won’t even be the first time he’s pulled off such a feat: He claimed the same number of film credits in 2017, which also included the first season of Netflix’s The Punisher, a breakthrough project for the actor in which he played the titular antihero. This is how, it becomes clear over our conversation, Bernthal works—he loves what he does, and he loves doing a lot of it.
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The classically trained Bernthal, who studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School and often prepares for roles as a Method actor, has mixed two kinds of Hollywood careers for years. He’s shifted between genre-TV work that’s built up his profile (The Walking Dead, The Punisher) and character actor jobs in films directed by everyone from Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street) to Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) to Steve McQueen (Widows). Looking beyond 2021, he’ll colead David Simon’s new miniseries We Own This City, headline Lena Dunham’s next film, Sharp Stick, and produce and star in an adaptation of Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo for Showtime.
It feels rather quaint, then, for this interview’s occasion to be limited to a single project. But King Richard, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic of Richard Williams—father to Venus and Serena—does feel like another one of those breakthrough moments for Bernthal. He plays Rick Macci, the tennis coach hired by Richard (Will Smith) to help facilitate his daughters’ paths to superstardom. A gentle, goofy, brilliantly skilled man, Rick is not the kind of guy you’d expect to be portrayed by Bernthal—who’s still often typecast as the “tough guy.” But in his wildly endearing, subtly transformative performance, the actor quickly, completely wins you over.
As such, for the first time, Oscar buzz is trailing Bernthal—smack in the middle of a period that feels like a major step in his career. “It has been a lot, man,” he says of this moment. “But I have no less hunger than I did when I was first starting.”
Vanity Fair: You really went after this part in King Richard, right? You auditioned, put yourself on tape, all that?
Jon Bernthal: I did. When I met Rei Green, the director of the film, we connected immediately. We’re both ex-college athletes. We both have young families. Sports was a huge part of our lives. We were both constantly one-upping each other with sports metaphors for this industry and for the process of creating this kind of work. [Laughs] He was also honest with me off the jump. I told him I really wanted to do this, and he said, “Look, man, you’re about 30 pounds too big and you’re not…” What he knew about me, he didn’t quite see it, but he dug the idea that I said I wanted to fight for it and go for it.
What spoke to you about it in that way? Why did you want to fight for it?
It taps into things that are just really, really personal and really, really important. Being a dad and believing in the power of family, the power of faith, and the power of athletics and how it can be such a beautiful metaphor for life. I just love that about this script. And then getting the sports aspect of it and the emotionality between parenting and childrearing and how that goes into sports, it was so important to Rei, and I knew I had to be a part of it.
You’re known as a Method actor, and I saw that out of King Richard, you’ve become an avid tennis player.
It’s a beautiful benefit to this work. Whatever the role call is for, we get to really train in that craft and in that trade. I played sports my whole life, but I hadn’t played tennis. But right in my little hometown of Ojai, there’s this unbelievable tennis center called the Weil Tennis Academy, which is very much like Rick Macci’s. It’s one of the top academies. Real credit to Rei and to Warner Brothers, they wanted to get the tennis right, so they facilitated me taking lessons between three and six hours a day, every day, both in training and tennis—but then also in training and coaching and understanding the vocabulary of coaching: how to run drills, how to feed. They actually let me train one of their players. I called her the champ; a top 20 junior in the country. I got to train her and work with her every day as Rick Macci. She got to be involved in my insane Method-acting project. [Laughs]
