Jon Bernthal
speaker
633 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Jon Bernthal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Like if my brothers are around, I am that guy. And I still to this day. You're their security. A little bit. And I just do remember my brother got into it. This guy was giving him a hard time and this other guy stepped in and I just got up. And I remember I hit this guy and I knocked his teeth out. I have this theory that you only got hurt in fights when it's your fault.
Somehow that was my scientific. That's very interesting. Complete bullshit. But, you know, I remember I got this huge infection on my hand and it was Christmas Eve. And I just woke up that next morning in this state of like absolute horror that this guy has to wake up on Christmas morning without his teeth.
Absolutely.
Literally my two front teeth. But I just remember being in DC and like crying my eyes out thinking about this guy. And that was at least the beginning of you got to stop this shit. Yeah, yeah. I always talk about this with my kids, like the steps of behavior. There's unconscious incompetence where you're just doing dumb shit and you have no idea you're doing it. And then that-
super incredible and vital point where you're like oh conscious incompetence I am doing something wrong why am I doing this and then that next step of conscious competence where you're like if I tell myself every day here it comes don't do that I can plan for it I can do a million different things to keep myself from doing that and then maybe you can get to that spot of unconscious competence where you don't even have to think about it you just do that and for the most part because I don't ever believe you're good I don't believe that this is gone from you or me or whatever but
I just do want to say, I think with my brothers and my friends, the one thing that was always present is we only wanted each other to be okay and to be safe and to grow out of our bullshit. And whether we were able to say that to each other at the time or not, no. But that was clear, is clear. And I'm so grateful for that. Yeah. Okay, Russia.
Yeah, I didn't know, man. I knew that this is what I wanted to do. Once I started acting, it was baseball and acting. Is this like 96? I went to Russia in 98 and then I was there from 98 to 2001.
Three years? Yeah, two years. I first went for a year and that was to be in the Russian school and she had hooked it up, got me an audition. And can I ask what the value of that, is that school where like Stanislavski taught?
Yeah, the Moscow Art Theater. Yeah. And I was just dealing with this case. I was in real trouble and having to deal with parole boards and not being able to continue school. And I went to her and I just said, look, how do you do this? I thought it was like being a plumber. Like, what are the steps that I need to do? This is what I want to do. I wanted to be a regional theater actor.
And that was it. And she said, look, there's no rhyme or reason to this thing. There's no one way. But she said, you know, if I were you, I would audition for the Moscow Art Theater. Americans haven't done this before. And I think what she knew, one, she needed to get me out of my environment.
And I think, too, there was a level of training over there and an environment over there that was so beyond humbling. Moscow was wild in the late 90s. It was completely run by the mob. Shootouts in the Duma. I had guns pulled on me multiple times within my first few days there. You know, it was a really lawless place.
And for a guy who's like, I'm a tough DC guy, like a barrel, like you are not tough. Like you are a little bug. These motherfuckers ate their shoes. Bro, the old lady on the street, right? Like the babushka will fuck you up. Straight up. And also, I hadn't done international travel. To go to a place to be a Russian actor, to be a Russian singer, that meant every bit as much as to be an American.
You know, to be an artist there was, for lack of a better word, at this time in my life, it was this enormously masculine thing. thing to do. You learn how to do ballet. You learn how to do acrobatics. You learn how to fight super rigorous and unbelievably cut throat. If you get into these schools, it's so hard to get in.
You know, out of 10,000 kids, they'll take a hundred and then every semester they'll cut you in half. That last year, those 10 kids, you're doing 10 plays in repertory. And when you show up to the theater, you're told which of those 10 plays you're doing and which role you're playing, both male and female. The level of discipline was so unlike anything I'd ever seen.
What's going on with the language? Is it So when I first got there, no, no, definitely not, man. Nobody was speaking English at all.
It was hard. I lived in a place called Park Kultury, which is a Gorky Park and not a great area in Moscow then. The deal is if you got into school, they provide a translator. So I had this guy who was with me all the time. But the cool thing was, is honestly, in your first 12, 13 months there, it's training your attention and your concentration.
A common exercise would be if there was 12 of us, it's like ensemble building. At the same time with no leaders or followers, we'd all stand up at the same time. And then at the same time, we'd all pick up our chairs. And at the same time, we'd all start moving around the room. And you would have a newspaper article and you would have to read a paragraph from that newspaper article.
While we're walking around the room, it's starting to get confusing, right? While we start walking around the room, I'm saying, Dax, what color is your underwear today? Right. And you would say red, right? Or whatever.
And then you would say, John, what'd you have for breakfast? Strawberries and eggs. And we'd go around the room. The teacher, meanwhile, is snapping, coughing, and clapping. Then at one point, the teacher says, stop. Everybody stops. And at the same time, everybody makes a semicircle with their chairs. At the same time, everybody puts their chairs down. Same time, everybody goes and sits down.
And you had to know, what did Dax ask John? What was the answers?
Showing 501–520 of 633 · page 26 of 32
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