John Bernthal knew he probably looked ridiculous—absolutely ridiculous. It was November, and the actor had come to Montreal for a 10-day shoot inside gaming giant Ubisoft’s motion capture (“mocap”) studio, which looked like an indoor squash court, if an indoor squash court was bathed in florescent white and adorned with something like 800 cameras. By then, The Punisher’s second season had wrapped (and its third season had not yet been cancelled), and Bernthal was on to another project: voicing and mocapping the villain in the video game shooter Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which releases Friday.
The eleventh game in the series, Breakpoint pits players, open-world-survival-style, against the armies of a billionaire tech mogul commanded by, that's right, motion-captured Bernthal. “I didn't know much about the world of video games or the process about making them,” he told Esquire in an interview last week. Nevertheless, he was prepared to make something new and raw. If that meant looking absurd, then he was there for it; Bernthal is uncomfortable being comfortable. So the Punisher, dressed in a bubbled spandex suit, wearing dots on his face and a camera contraption attached to his head, took up a prop gun and strolled onto set.
In game, this particular scene begins with a speech that Bernthal’s character, Cole Walker, an ex-military, anti-establishment renegade commander, delivers to his team of elite super soldiers. In meatspace, the scene entailed a two-page monologue that Bernthal had to deliver in front of 15 equally-ridiculous-looking actors in bubbled spandex, all holding guns, all in a room surrounded by expensive equipment as several actual Special Forces soldiers looked on.
Unlike TV and film, video game shoots aren’t enormous time commitments, and Bernthal only needed to be in Montreal for 10 days. He soon learned why: Motion capture must be filmed in one take. A 15-minute cutscene is shot in exactly 15 minutes, uncut, no breaks, no mistakes. So while the combat wouldn’t necessarily be as dangerous as, say, filming The Punisher—the second season saw Bernthal break his hand on the first day of filming, tear ligaments on the second day, and dislocate something on the third—there would be unbelievable performative pressure.
And after Bernthal finished his two-page monologue, his team of bubbled men would be ambushed, requiring him to reconstruct, perfectly, several minutes of firefight choreography. If he fucked up the movement, even just a step, the entire shoot would have to start over. Then Bernthal would have to re-recite his two pages of monologue again, perfectly.
But Bernthal didn’t mind. In fact, standing there, spandex and all, he kinda dug it.
“You can cobble performances together [in TV and film],” he says. “You operate under the umbrella of that safety: You know it’s all going to work, you just have to get bits and pieces, and you can rely on the filmmakers to put it together. This is totally different. Any mistake means you're back to the drawing board. You got to start over. That puts pressure on everybody. It makes it high-stakes. But it also makes it fun.”
“Fun” because of the raw, no-bullshit nature of the performance, that you-cannot-fuck-this-up pressure, which reminds Bernthal of his two earliest passions, sports and live theater.
Bernthal’s challenge with this scene wasn't just to sell tactical realism. It was also to convince you, the player, that the turncoat you’ve spent most of the game trying to kill, him, may actually be kind of a reasonable guy. It’s no small feat. The first time Bernthal appears on screen in game, he's shooting down your helicopter and massacring your men. In the cutscene after the attack, Bernthal looms behind a lone solider who turns to find him there, with his gun. “Sorry, Weaver,” Bernthal says in that vocal-fried, vaguely Southern accent. Then the Punisher shoots Weaver in the face.
Breaking from blockbuster TV in order to film a video game (even just for 10 days) might seem like a strange professional move. God knows video game actors aren’t handsomely paid, and Breakpoint might not provide Bernthal the sort of critical attention he's likely to garner when he once again storms the big and small screens—this fall with the historical racing drama Ford vs. Ferrari and then next year with David Chase’s Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. But Bernthal seems to be enjoying his short break from promoting traditional screen rolls. And he’s not exactly an actor known for playing it safe.
Bernthal’s actor bio reads less like your standard thespian tale and more like some Salingerian wandering: Fights, beatings, and general troublemaking at an urban high school; then baseball, drugs, and parties at rural college, punctuated by an accidental acting class; then a trip to the Moscow Art Theatre; then a return to the States; then a spate of soap opera auditions and serial crime dramas that went nowhere. Then, The Walking Dead. He’s now worked with everyone from Martin Scorsese to Denis Villeneuve to Edgar Wright to Steve McQueen.
Bernthal put all that behind him at the E3 video game conference this summer, where he introduced his first post-Punisher role (and perhaps the next chapter of his acting career) in a space totally foreign to him. Taking the Ubisoft stage, wearing Signature Bernthal—untucked dark button-down over semi-fitted dark jeans tucked into dark combat boots—he met the screams and random shouts of “I love you!” with that surprisingly shy grin. He really did seem humbled and honoured to be there, amongst the gamers.
Bernthal isn’t the only screen actor venturing into gaming. Also at E3 was Keanu Reeves, who will be appearing in the upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077. When Bernthal brought out his rescue Pit Bull, Bam Bam, during his presentation, the internet seized upon Punisher/John Wick crossover speculation, which, when one considers that shared universes hardly existed in film before 2012, doesn’t seem like a far-off possibility for gaming. (Maybe just not those franchises.)
So there’s Reeves and Bernthal, newly minted video game stars. Then, next month, Death Stranding will feature another Walking Dead actor, Norman Reedus, alongside Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux. They join video game mocap veterans like Terry Crews, Kit Harrington, Jeff Goldblum, and Ellen Page.
With all the opportunities, Bernthal thinks actors would be crazy not to attempt a foray into gaming. “I think that it's an enormous mistake to turn your back and be resistant to new forms of media,” he says. “I mean, can you imagine 10 years ago if an actor said, Hey, I don't want to be a part of anything streaming?”
If there’s stigma against actors entering video games—even in the film world, motion-capture performances fly under awards radars, as if they're somehow different from, you know, acting acting—Bernthal says that's not something he pays attention to. “Any time in my life I've made decisions based on sticking to things I know well, it’s been a mistake," he tells me. "It’s the job of the artist to rush towards things you don't know about and to learn about them.”
Stigma aside, you'd have reason to believe Bernthal might have wanted to avoid a character like Breakpoint's Walker, and it has everything to do with that other skull-wearing ex-military man those E3 fans were no doubt screaming for: Frank Castle, the Punisher. Bernthal’s penchant for playing rough-and-tumble uniformed (and uniform-averse) men—soldiers, criminals, criminal soldiers, ex-soldiers fighting criminals—can be easily traced. In fact, one of the reasons Ubisoft asked Bernthal to take the role was his relationship with the military; there is probably no current Hollywood face more recognisable in the role of combat veteran than Bernthal’s.
Bernthal’s challenge in the next era of his career could be one of redefinition, of finding gun-free leading roles. If he wants to avoid being typecast as The Angry Man with the Giant Gun, he may need to put the Punisher away. But for now, it doesn’t appear Bernthal has any intention of doing away with what the Punisher gave him: the chance to pick up a fake gun and work with real veterans.
“Whenever I get to meet and know and train with the folks that actually do the things that I pretend to do on screen—it's an enormous honor for me,” Bernthal says. “And it's been the highlight of my career. It's afforded me some of the best friends I have in this world.”
That work was what really brought him to Montreal in November. It was how he managed to not break character when he had to say, “The only test of a man's worth is battle," straight-faced to 15 spandex-wearing actors in a sparse studio under bright white lights. He didn’t want to let the writers of Breakpoint, actual veterans, down. He had taken the role for them.
Bernthal’s work has also given the world a little better glimpse at what happens when these men and women return home, after the combat switch is flipped off.
“When we talk about the disillusioned vet—what maybe Frank and [Walker] have in common—I think that's coming from the fact that these guys are at the tip of the spear,” Bernthal says. “They just know more than we do. They see more than we do. They have gotten their information and their world view not by being delivered by a biased media, but by their own experiences.”
Video games, movies, shows; it's all the same to Bernthal if it has that raw, no bullshit spirit. The only difference might be the pressure. And if video games give him that added drive, the one traditional screen roles can't always provide—to get it right on one take, no fuck ups—then Ghost Recon Breakpoint may not be the last time he suits up with bubbles and face dots. Yeah, he looked ridiculous. But he absolutely dug it.
