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Podbit · SmartLess

"Jon Bernthal"

Explore episode Jun 8, 2026
Arts
Russia Saved His Life: Theater as a Lifeline

"Jon Bernthal" · Jun 8, 2026 Arts

Bernthal's first theater teacher, after catching him fabricate that deathbed story, sent him to the Moscow Art Theatre as both a punishment and a revelation. His teachers there had performed illegal plays in subway tunnels and abandoned buildings during times when public gatherings were outlawed, risking prison for art they believed in religiously. That combination of danger, reverence, and masculine cultural respect for the arts hit Bernthal differently than anything America could have offered him at that age.

2m 5s

Where this was said

Discovering Theater by Accident and the Path to Russia

At 17:30 · chapter starts 12:20

Bernthal was a football and baseball player in college who was 'running into every wall' and getting in all kinds of trouble. Athletes told him he needed an arts credit, so he signed up for what he thought was a lecture hall full of 600 kids watching movies. It was an intimate class of 10 serious theater students. The first assignment: bring in something deeply important and share it. Bernthal had nothing, but he had his catcher's glove in his bag for practice. So he invented an elaborate story about his mother giving him the glove on her deathbed. His mother was alive and well in D.C. He cried. The class cried. Snot ran. Teacher Alma Becker cleared the room, tore into him for violating the sanctity of her studio — and then told him he had something. His punishment was to audition for the play. When he eventually got in trouble and couldn't finish school, it was Becker who told him there was no conventional pathway: go to Moscow, study at the Art Theatre. That blind faith in one teacher changed everything.

History
The Wild West of 1999 Moscow

"Jon Bernthal" · Jun 8, 2026 History

When Bernthal arrived in Russia in 1999, there were shootings at the Duma and Chechen apartment building bombings happening in the city. He considered himself street-smart and a boxer, but nothing prepared him for a place with a completely different alphabet, language, and a jarring blend of brutality and profound reverence for the arts — statues of playwrights and poets on every corner.

2m 35s

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