When Jon Bernthal walks into a café, heads turn. It’s that face: the bashed-in boxer’s nose, the brown eyes full of pain. Before he orders his Americano, his purple-bruised knuckles catch your eye. Makeup? Nope. (Although he does have a few made-for-TV scars—he’s ﬁlming the Netﬂix series The Punisher.) In every role—in projects ranging from The Wolf of Wall Street to Sicario to The Accountant to The Walking Dead, with directors from Roman Polanski to Oliver Stone—Bernthal brings a sensitivity rarely seen in tough-guy characters. And in person, he brings a genuine I-just-wanna-level-with-you frankness that we suspect won’t be with him much longer. Superstardom has a way of making you shut up about your off-the-rails adolescence, your stints in jail, your embrace of your feminine side, and your love of Shia LaBeouf. We’ll let him tell you the story.

I was born with these ginormous fucking earlobes, and the doctor suggested to my parents that we get elective plastic surgery. Like, who does that to a baby? Obviously my parents were like, “Fuck off.” But they were definitely very worried that I was going to be plauged. So yes, my looks have always been a source of embarrassment. In India, I guess, big earlobes are a sign of wisdom—that’s what my mom used to tell me. But then I was getting shit grades and getting kicked out of every school I went to, so I was like, “Ma, I don’t think that’s what it means.”

I got in a lot of trouble as a kid, and it definitely defined who I was as a young man: I was that kid. One of my first memories is of a kid picking on my little brother. My brother was in diapers, and I remember punching this kid in the face and realizing, “Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do.” It was my job—not to be the protector, but the tough guy, the troublemaker.

I was really scared as a kid—D.C. was a tough city then. I was 11 years old, getting thrown into a telephone booth and beat up by a bunch of 18 year olds. Then, in eighth grade, me and my friends were getting mugged, and we fought back with baseball bats. And from there it just kind of grew and grew and grew and grew. There was a group of guys that I knew that, yes, got shot or ended up in prison. I definitely got locked up a few times. That’s a world that I inherently get.

When I was at Skidmore College, I never wrote a paper. I mean, Skidmore is a total rich kid fucking [place]. But what did I do? I found the kid who was tied into Irish gangs in Boston and the gangster kids whose dads were mob guys. That’s who I wanted to be like. I went right to them, and then to the townies that were supplying the place with drugs. Those were my guys.

You had to take an arts requirement at Skidmore, and I’d heard about this class called Intro to Theater, that basically was sitting in a big auditorium with 300 people, watching movies. I heard that people would drop acid or get high beforehand, and I was like, “Fuck, yeah. That is for me.” But me being the shitbag that I am, I mistakenly signed up for Intro to Acting rather than Intro to Theater, so I wound up with these ten wannabe theater majors in Alma Becker’s class. I’m like, “What the fuck? Where are the movies? There’s only ten of us? Where am I supposed to hide?”

The first assignment was you had to bring in something that meant a lot to you, and you had to share it with the group, like a game of show-and-tell on steroids. I remember one woman brought in a Blues Traveler CD that her boyfriend had given her. She’s telling the group about it, and I’m like, “Why are we listening to this shit?”

I had baseball practice right after class, so I grabbed my catcher’s glove and launched into this story about how my mom had given me this glove on her deathbed and how me and my brother would sometimes have a catch. Of course, my mom was alive and well in D.C. But I'm telling this story, and I look around the room, and everyone’s crying their eyes out, and I’m crying my eyes out.

I don’t know what it was about Alma, but when she said “That’s what you need to do,” I was like, “Okay, fine.” All of a sudden, I had a connection with something. I was like, “Wow, nobody can take this from me. This is mine. I could be happy being in this black-box theater doing this play for the rest of my life.” I was so beholden to Alma and so grateful that when she said, “Go to Moscow,” I was like, “Fuck, yeah.”

When I got to the Moscow Art Theatre, I remember feeling tough, that whatever there was to go through, I had been through it. I lived in Park Kultury, four people in a teeny room. You’d turn on the lights in the bathroom at night and see cockroaches everywhere. Two of my roommates were lovers, and then my other roommate was in the other bed, and I slept on the floor in between them. You know how some people have sex for a couple minutes? These guys were fucking all night.

It was my birthday and the first day of school. I had to turn around because I forgot my papers, and I get lost. By the time I get back, it’s getting dark. So I get back to Park Kultury and I’m walking home on this empty side street when this car pulls up in front of me, and two guys get out and open up the back, and there’s this woman in a red cocktail dress with red hair. They grab her by the hair and pull her out of the car. She’s not protesting. She’s not screaming. She’s looking right at me.

I remember thinking she looked just like Nicole Kidman.

They pull her out across the sidewalk, and they go up to the side of this building and they’re opening her head up on it. I run at the guys and grab one of them, and I’m shouting at him, “What the fuck are you doing?” The guy takes out a gun and puts it right on my forehead and says in English: “Go. Away.”