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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
How many coughs? How many snaps? Exercise. Yeah, yeah. But while you're doing your own thing. But while you're reading your thing, and then you need to know every answer and you need to be able to recite. That sounds perfect for you. It was perfect for me. Yeah, yeah. Especially coming from the sports background. It was more rigorous than boxing. It was more rigorous than football.
It was more rigorous than anything I'd ever done. And I think in Russia, to be an acting teacher is the highest acclaim that you can get. So my teachers were the biggest stars. Wow, yeah. Not just that they were famous, but they were the most respected. Oleg Tabakov is like the Robert De Niro of Russia. He's a teacher.
So if you're anywhere in Moscow and a Moscow art theater teacher comes into the place that you're in, you have to stand up and you can't sit down until they sit down. Those guys all lived through communist times. So, you know, public gatherings were outlawed. So if you were to do theater, it was always state sponsored theater. Probably propaganda to some level.
Propaganda to some level, but then if they said, okay, you guys are doing a play and this is a state-sponsored play, but because my arbitrary look on it, if I'm a state person, you know, I think that there's actually an anti-state message. Yeah. They'll come to your house and kill you. Yeah. Meyerhold was one of the biggest Russian directors in the Moscow Art Theater.
Assassinated in his apartment. Teachers sent to Siberia. Well, did they or did they not?
Who knows? You know, it's corrupt as hell. This is where they came up in. And my three main acting teachers, these three men, they're best friends. I love these guys. And they did this play called Cinzano about these three best friends who one of their mothers died and they sit in an apartment and drink a bottle of Cinzano and talk about it. They did it all through the 80s.
performing in subway tunnels and abandoned buildings, putting signs up through the city. If anyone had been caught. Dead. I don't know if they'd be dead, but they'd definitely go to prison. They'd definitely be in trouble and they performed it anyway. So there was just this level of vitality to it that I think I really responded to. How lonely were you? No internet. I didn't have an email account.
I didn't have a cell phone. So there's no calls home.
Yeah. That would be what would sustain me. Things were not looking good for me. Like I do feel every day I am in church, man. I am walking the walk. It's just for me, my mind was blown every single day, spiritually, physically. and just being in such a different environment. And I don't know if that's even possible now. I had one phone call on Christmas.
I called my mom and my dad, and I called my best friend, Greg Zumis. And I remember how awkward it was, and I didn't know how to talk to them. And my dad was like, do you know how much this is costing? Are you sure? I'm like, Pop, what are we talking about, bro?
While I was there to make a little bit of money, Moscow had just gotten a team. It was interesting there because all these new sort of American things were popping out. You really had very different Russias and very different Moscow.
The Moscow that all the kids that I went to school with, you know, they were coming in their whole families from the Ural Mountains, eating off a hot plate, really destitute. At night, it was drinking vodka, singing, rapping, playing theater games. No one had any money. So it was like you scrounge together what you had. That was the Russia that I knew.
But there was this other thing with the mafia and it was this fascination with American culture and these sort of American restaurants and McDonald's. And one of the things was baseball. So there was this new thing in Russia where these mafia guys would go with their model girlfriends and go watch baseball games. I went in 2000 to Russia.
Real, real, real drinking. Not surprising to see dead guys on the subway on the way to school. There are certain cultural rules on the street. Like if somebody falls down and cracks their head open, you do not touch that person. You don't help them. You don't call anybody.
I could tell you stories all day, like really brutal, dark stories that happened there. But for every single one of those, I've got one that is so profoundly beautiful.
Both of those things exist at the same time there.
And on every corner, there's a statue of a playwright or a poet or an actor. To find somebody like a street guy, he'll know what's playing at the Bolshoi. He'll be able to name all the members of the Moscow Art Theater. And when you go, there's no idea of this sort of like subscription-based gentry exclusive theater. Yeah. The theater is religion. Every theater is packed every night.
People are sitting in the rows. It's cheap. You take your family to the theater. You go and you see theater. It's like something that you do and not in any kind of like, do you know who's going to be in this? And also just the way that these plays are even put on. There's no such thing as, okay, we're gonna rehearse, and then we've rented this theater, so we're gonna go up in June.
You rehearse a play until the director says it's ready. Could be three years. Once you have a role, like if you're playing Hamlet and you're playing Desdemona, those are your roles, and you might get a call next week. Every night, there's a bill of what shows. It's not like this show is playing here. You're going to see Dax in Hamlet tonight.
And then tomorrow they're doing Othello and you're playing Desdemona. So you have your parts. There's plays that have been running there for 35 years and they're just, oh, they're going to do it at the Taganka tonight. And you got to see this production. It's like a rock band.
Showing 521–540 of 633 · page 27 of 32
← Previous
Next →