Jon Bernthal on Walking the Streets of Baltimore with David Simon & George Pelecanos in HBO’s ‘We Own This City’

Since his breakout role as Shane on The Walking Dead back in 2010, Jon Bernthal has been making strong impressions in a number of outstanding productions in roles both big (The Punisher, Sweet Virginia, and King Richard) and small (The Wolf of Wall Street, Wind River, Sicario). As much as all of those parts have been made indelible by Bernthal’s singular, authentic presence, I venture to say that all those roads have led to his career-defining portrayal of Wayne Jenkins in We Own This City—David Simon and George Pelaconos’ return to the streets of Baltimore fourteen years after their TV masterpiece, The Wire, finished its run in 2008.

In our conversation, Jon and I talk about stepping out onto those streets, creating a companion piece to The Wire, and his creation of a character that is magnetic and repellant in near equal measure. His performance is a bold tour de force in a show that needed every ounce of it to reach the grand heights it aspired to.

Awards Daily: You’re from the DC area. Just down the road from Baltimore. Was that one of your attachments to doing this series?

Jon Bernthal: Well, I am from DC. Surprisingly, even though they’re only about 35 minutes apart, the cities have very little to do with each other and culturally they’re pretty different. I was an enormous fan of The Wire like so many, and I think right now to do this show at what is sort of the apex of the anti-police movement, when policing and race are ripping the country apart and it’s so under the microscope and surrounded by so much discourse that’s so agenda-driven and so geared toward picking sides, the opportunity to work with David (Simon) and George (Pelecanos), who really dive into the nuance and really explore all sides of issues, and have both the street cred to gain access into the community and have a real love for and home in that community, it’s exactly the kind of work I want to do with exactly the kind of people I want to do it with. So for me it was an absolute no-brainer—I went for this one. 

Awards Daily: We Own This City plays as a companion piece to The Wire in a lot of ways. But that’s a lot to be compared against, right? It’s one of the greatest shows in the history of television. Did you have any trepidation around delving into that world and having it be compared?

Jon Bernthal: Of course—well, I mean there was no trepidation around whether or not I’d want to do it. [Laughs.] For me, the fear was that this is an unbelievably vital issue. And these are real people in a real city, where folks have lost their lives, folks have lost their freedom, folks have lost their careers. People’s lives have been upended. It’s very raw in a city that’s very much been at the tip of the spear of so much of the issues of policing and race. But I had the opportunity to explore it with these folks. 

I mean look, I was walking into the Baltimore Police Department pretty much saying “hey look, we’re here to tell a story that is perhaps the darkest chapter in the history of your department.” But because I’m walking in saying “hey these are the same folks that made The Wire,” I was able to go in and for three months go on ride-alongs every day in every district in the city. I was able to go with flex squad units, plainclothes units, with patrol units, with the SWAT team on drug raids and gun raids. And you know, most departments at this point in time, at the apex of the anti-police movement, would probably say “no way.” But because of the resonance that The Wire has in this city, we were able to shoot in the real locations, oftentimes with the real victims, with the real cops, and there’s such a journalistic integrity and a commitment to telling the truth with this show. Of course it scared me, but that’s just all the more reason to do it.

Awards Daily: I was grateful to your PR team for tipping me to your Podcast [Real Ones]. You have a fascinating episode with Anthony Maggio from the Baltimore Police Department where you seem pretty close. How much did conversations with Anthony inform your performance as Wayne Jenkins?

Jon Bernthal: Tony Maggio has become unbelievably close to me. Tony and Wayne Jenkins were best friends. A lot of people when I got to the city of Baltimore said, if there’s one guy who you want to talk to, if there’s one guy left in the department that still polices that way, it’s Tony Maggio. Wayne Jenkins was considered, and still is considered by many in that department, to be one of the best cops that had ever policed there; because of his tactics, his ability to read the street, his ability to foster relationships, his ability to understand the way the streets work and the way to get close with people, but also due to his fierceness, his toughness, his aggressiveness. 

My whole thing was getting to know Tony. His life was upended by his proximity to Wayne. Tony is a great man who has respect in the community, he’s from East Baltimore, grew up on those streets. He has so much love for that community and that community has so much love for him, but he’s a no-nonsense cop. I got to go on countless ride-alongs with him and his team,  so it wasn’t just conversations with Tony or a friendship with Tony—I was able to be out on the streets with him and to learn from him. I’m so unbelievably grateful for that. He gave me more insight into Wayne because of his closeness to him than probably anybody else. But I’m grateful to all the folks at the BPD who opened up their lives to me and who took care of me.

Awards Daily: A lot of the show is about police corruption, but your character shows how personal corruption can happen. Your character doesn’t start off as someone who would necessarily turn into the guy that he does. One thing Anthony Maggio said to you during your podcast was that when cops go astray, things start becoming very personal for them; it becomes about ego. Your performance as Wayne Jenkins portrays a lot of ego. Do you think that’s where Wayne slid off the table?

Jon Bernthal: I absolutely do. It makes me happy that that’s your interpretation, because that’s exactly it. There’s nobody like David and George who can examine the system and examine how the system ultimately affects the individual. The system, the culture of policing in the post-Freddie Gray world, to sort of combat the work slowdown after Freddie Gray, was to reward cops for putting numbers on the board. They made it literally a contest. How many guns can you get? The more guns you get, the more rewards you get, the more access you get, the less questions are being asked of you. Now, Wayne didn’t make those rules. Wayne didn’t create that system. He came up in that culture, and Wayne wanted to be the best. 

That’s who he was. He has a huge ego. He was a fighter, he was a marine, he was a football player; he wanted to be the best and he wanted people to know he was the best. And he was rewarded for being the best, and ultimately what the reward gave him was cover to become unbelievably corrupt. And at that point it’s not about fault, it’s not about which came first or did one create the other; it’s just the perfect storm of character, system, ego, greed. And I hope that’s all in there. Because there are folks that you talk to who knew Wayne really well who were so unbelievably shocked that he did what he did. And then there are people who knew Wayne really well that said it made perfect sense; that of course he was doing all that. And you know, when you talk to Wayne on the phone it’s in fifteen minute increments—because he’s in federal prison that’s all you get—and in a fifteen minute phone call he will try to convince you of his innocence and explain away his guilt, then talk about how somebody else is the best guy in the world, and also talk about how guilty he is. All within the same fifteen minutes. And everything is said with conviction. Again, it’s this perfect storm of psychology and the system at play that helped ignite and perpetuate the kind of unbelievably toxic behavior that ultimately led to the downfall of the Gun Trace Task Force. 

Awards Daily: There’s a lot of physicality in your performance that can be really, well, unattractive in most people. The strutting, the flexing—not to mention the personality affects like Wayne talking about himself in the third person [laughs]. When we were watching, my wife made a comment about it, she said “This performance is so brave”—because it seems like you just didn’t hesitate at all to go that route.

Jon Bernthal: The one thing folks unfailingly said about Wayne is he was larger than life. You know, when he walked into a room everyone knew he was there and he wanted you to know he was there. Whether they were talking glowingly about him or whether they were saying he was the biggest asshole who ever lived, everybody talked about his arrogance. And ego and arrogance are usually covering up for something else; there’s just so much there. Tell your wife I really appreciate what she said, the fact that she said it was brave. The obstacle for me was that in this piece I was working with so many non-actors, so acting in such a big, brash, giant way—it was scary at times. It was like, oh man, am I doing too much? And I have two things to say about that. Number one is: I would just always go back to the men and women of the Baltimore Police Department who knew Wayne really well, and who were always with me on set. I always went back to them and they were like, “That’s him, that’s Wayne.” The other part is: Reinaldo Marcus Green. He’s like my brother, and he’s one of the best directors I’ve ever had the honor to work with. 

I came off of working with him on King Richard and we decided to go and do this together. We have a shorthand that I believe in with every fiber in my body, and to me, it’s exactly the actor / director relationship that I want. He’s my friend, he’s my partner, and I trust him. And if Rei says, “hey man you gotta bring that down a notch,” I’m going to listen. And if he says, “step on the gas,” I’m going to listen. If there’s anything in that performance that, like your wife said, was brave or that registers, I credit that just as much with Rei than anything I did. He knew that he put me out there in the community with the police and in the community to get to know Wayne through people who Wayne victimized, people who he coached football with, through people that he grew up with, and I really felt like I understood Wayne. That’s who the guy was, for better or for worse.

I was able to do my work, and really that’s not a testament to me but a testament to David Simon and George Pelecanos, and to their history and the resonance of The Wire in that city. That’s why people opened up their hearts and opened up their homes to me; they opened up their squad cars and they opened up the streets to me. 

Awards Daily: The response to the show has been magnificent and the reviews are fantastic; it has to feel good to delve into something so important and have it be received in this way.

Jon Bernthal: I think that normally when you’re on a project, your day-to-day goal is to create a scene and you want to make it as entertaining as possible, or as scary as possible, or as funny as possible. You want to make sure the stakes are as high as possible. There’s all these goals that you could have on a day of work in this business. On this show, every day what was prime, what was held as the absolute top of the line, was us just telling the truth. It was: let’s try to make this as real as possible. Again, we got to bring in the real people, and if anyone was there who really knew what happened, their word won. And I’m really honored to be a part of something like that. And so for me, that’s the biggest reward in this. I am really glad that people dig it. I am really touched and honored that there are folks in the press that dig it. 

For me, the amount of love and the response from the city of Baltimore, and from the police department, that’s what’s really blown me away. Without sounding too grandiose, I think the highest achievement you can have in art is to hold a mirror to society, to tell the truth, and make society look at it. I think honestly that’s where real change can come, and I do think this show has that kind of potential. I think that that’s what we’re after here—to just hold that mirror up and really try to tell the truth. I hold my head so high because of the way we made this show, and I’m so proud of the folks that made it. We made this show with the city of Baltimore, for the city of Baltimore.

Awards Daily: Did it feel good to get the money line, “We own this city” ?

Jon Bernthal: [laughs]. You know, every line was an honor. For me, that speech was really important. But then, all the speeches were. I mean, David Simon and George Pelecanos—those guys are titans. I improvised a lot in this—a lot—and that is not always music to television writers’ ears. And I get that these guys are on the Mount Rushmore of television writers, of writers period. But ultimately, these guys really trusted me, and in order to play a character like this with reckless abandonment, which I think is absolutely necessary, I needed to go off script. I needed to bring in things Wayne really said, that people told me he said, and for the most part these guys really let me fly. And when it came to the physicality, and the little sayings like “I love me some me”—those kinds of improvisations—I was just so grateful for that freedom. Because they could have said, hey man, stick to the script, because the script’s great. It says a lot about those guys as artists. It says a lot about their belief in themselves, their belief in me, and their belief in the material and their research process that they let that happen. I’m really grateful for it.