Actor Jon Bernthal on grit, dedication & the teacher who saved him

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, John Bernthal, has spent two decades playing the kind of men you'd want to avoid, and somehow he makes you root for them anyway.

This summer, he's in two major films, reprising his role as the Punisher in the upcoming Spider-Man movie, and starring in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. His breakout role, in 2010, was as Shane on The Walking Dead, a sheriff's deputy protecting a band of survivors from zombies until he becomes the greater threat. He won an Emmy as Mikey, the brother whose ghost haunts every episode of The Bear, and this year he starred in the Netflix hit series His and Hers and appeared on Broadway and Dog Day Afternoon. Bernthaw says he couldn't have predicted any of this. He grew up in Washington, D.C., a baseball player better known for fighting than acting, and by his own telling, he was a kid headed in the wrong direction.

An acting teacher saw something in him and sent him of all places to one of the world's toughest classical theater conservatories in Russia. He returned transformed, co founded a theater company, performed in dozens of stage productions, and spent years grinding through sitcom guest spots in small film roles before his break finally came. In the Odyssey, Bernthal makes his Christopher Nolan film debut, playing Menelaus, king of Sparta. A few weeks into production, in the Moroccan desert, the Cash shot the Trojan Horse sequence, one of the film's most iconic scenes.

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