‘I’m a big believer in pain being an adhesive’: Jon Bernthal on ‘walking through fire’ for Ava DuVernay

The actor’s new film Origin sees him star as the husband of Pulitzer-winner Isabel Wilkerson. He reflects on the fight for social justice and avoiding the new film seeming like a ‘woke agenda’

As Jon Bernthal’s face pings on to the screen from his California home, I’m peering in to his giant living room, looking for his three pit bull terriers. While he was, for a long time, mainly thought of as the square-jawed beefcake Shane Walsh in The Walking Dead (2010 to 2012, then again in 2018 and 2022), and later as the iron-pecced Punisher in two eponymous series and various episodes of Daredevil, the 47-year-old has become more associated with social conscience, on screen and off.

He has a podcast, Real Ones, where he talks to people on the frontlines of big issues – police officers, gang members, doctors, soldiers. He runs a community empowerment NGO, Drops Fill Buckets, with his brother Nick, an orthopaedic surgeon and professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. (Their other brother, Tom, is a business consultant and is married to the former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.) And he advocates for pit bulls, the much-demonised dog breed, and has three of his own.