Jon Bernthal recently admitted that he wasn’t quite ready to stop playing the Punisher yet, but after revealing the long list of injuries that he sustained while portraying the character during the show’s two-season run on Netflix, you’d be forgiven for wondering why.
Bernthal has always been known as a very physical and intense actor that’s more than willing to do his own stunts, and it certainly sounds as though he was put through the wringer in an effort to deliver the best onscreen version of Frank Castle yet.
Here’s what he had to share:
“If you saw Punisher season 2, that whole thing with my broken hand, my hand that got shot? That’s because in that first bar fight, it was a three-day fight, and on the first day, I broke my hand. On the second day, I tore a bunch of ligaments. On the third day, I disloacated, so they had to do an emergency surgery. So they wrote that thing in, because we had to go back to work the next day, So they wrapped up my hand and I kept shooting.”
Not all of the Marvel Netflix shows were greeted with universal critical acclaim, but for the most part they certainly delivered when it came to the fight scenes. Sure, after Daredevil’s first season you started to wonder why each member of the Defenders enjoyed brawling in hallways so much, but the results were often stellar. Bernthal admitted as much, too, saying that the cast and crew gave their all to deliver the best fight sequences possible, often on a much shorter schedule than would be found on a movie set.
“I think what made them stand apart a little bit is that we were trying to do movie-level fights in a TV show. In a movie, you might have two months to shoot an action scene, you rehearse it forever. We’ve gotta rehearse it, learn it, shoot it, usually in afternoon. It’s much less time. So our saying on our show is, ‘You do it real and you do it once’. So if you’re throwing someone through a wall, just throw them through the damn wall. Do it hard, do it once.”
The actor sounds incredibly dedicated to the realism that it takes in bringing a hard-hitting character like the Punisher to the screen, and it seems like he doesn’t have an issue with the injuries that come with that dedication. If Frank Castle is to be rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the future then, as we’ve heard he will, Bernthal would likely show no hesitation in jumping back into the role.