The man eventually woke up. Bernthal was charged with felony assault, and the man sued him for $2 million. (Criminal charges were reduced to misdemeanors after witnesses came forward; the civil suit was settled out of court.) Bernthal took anger-management courses. He went to therapy. The following July, a year after the Venice incident, Bernthal was filming AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which jump-started his career. Days after the first season wrapped, he married his girlfriend, Erin, a trauma nurse he’d been dating since returning from Moscow. “We’re pretty sure my wife got pregnant with our first that night,” he told me.
But as Bernthal left his former self behind, that self started showing up in his roles. “The Walking Dead,” in which he played a volatile hothead, set him on a steady path of playing cops, mobsters, military guys and dirtbags. When we met in May, Bernthal was rehearsing an Ojai production of “Ironbound,” a play about a New Jersey cleaning woman and her two-timing boyfriend.
Bernthal has been living in Ojai for more than a decade with his wife and three children. It was Emily Blunt, who Bernthal worked with on Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario,” who told him about the small valley town northwest of Los Angeles. Bernthal’s younger son is now the starting quarterback for his youth football team. His daughter works at a horse ranch and rides rodeo. Bernthal coaches middle-school football and basketball. He loves Ojai so much that he wrote an entire monologue about it for his character in “Wind River.” (“It’s like fruit farms and vineyards and there’s these mountains surrounding it. …”)
Bernthal sees Ojai as a town in quiet conflict. The influx of L.A. people — fleeing Covid, fires, crime — has been displacing the blue-collar population. In 2023, the middle school closed, because the new residents tend to send their children to private schools. Bernthal, a reluctant private-school kid, is unsurprisingly annoyed by this. This spring he decided to start and self-fund Ojai’s first theater festival to raise money for the high school. Which is why we were in a defunct school auditorium in Ojai where he was rehearsing with the actress Marin Ireland. But with all his recent travel, he barely had time to learn his lines. “Everybody’s been rehearsing,” he said, “and I’ve been on Jimmy Kimmel and Kelly Clarkson being an [expletive].”
Bernthal went straight from talking to me into a scene, in which he plays a mailman trying to convince his girlfriend to get into his car. He and Ireland ran the scene four times. Sometimes they made each other laugh. One time Bernthal cried. He ran at Ireland, and sometimes he pleaded. He tried to go big, he tried to go soft. He encouraged Ireland to hit him for real and to spit on him.