Playing the “Punisher” might come easily to Jon Bernthal because he’s been violent in real life.
On July 3, 2009, a 32-year-old Bernthal was walking his pit bull in Venice Beach when a drunk man called to the dog and allegedly began following Bernthal home. Bernthal told the man to back off and when he didn’t, the actor clocked the man in the face, rendering him unconscious. An hour later, Bernthal found himself in a police station where he says cops told him, “If that guy doesn’t wake up, you’re going away for life.”
Bernthal recalled the incident in Esquire’s winter issue. “I knew if he didn’t wake up, I was going to jail and my worst side would take over,” he said, adding that the man’s head was split open. “I prayed to whatever is above that if he woke up, I’d change things, get married, have kids, and stop with the anger.”
He kept his word, marrying Erin Angle, and raising two sons and a daughter.
“I know now life is more about working things out and heading off that violence,” Bernthal, 41, said. “Extremism and lack of compromise is the enemy of what I want to teach [my kids].”
Prior to that incident, Bernthal had several other run-ins with the law, including being busted with small amounts of marijuana as a teen.
“Jon was always the family f—kup,” Bernthal’s older brother Tom told the magazine. “There’s, like, one legal thing in the world Jon could do — he’d make a great drug dealer — and that’s acting. He was lucky. We came from the one family in a million who didn’t throw him out of the house. The thing I remember is he could take over a room even when he was three. He’s always had that presence.”