Jon Bernthal on the Violence in The Punisher: One Last Kill

The latest Punisher special is easily the most violence you’ll see on Disney’s streaming service. Type “P” into the search bar of Disney+ and you’ll see results for The Punisher: One Last Kill right next to Peter Pan and The Princess and the Frog, despite the fact that the Marvel film stars Jon Bernthal as a vigilante who isn’t afraid to dole out deadly justice on the streets of New York City.

In one scene, Bernthal stabs a muscly thug in the neck with a pen until he spurts blood all over his face. In another, a man kidnaps a dog just to immediately toss the animal in the direction of a trash truck driving down the street. Though we don’t see the accident on screen, the dog’s squeal certainly makes it hard not to imagine the poor little guy being crushed by tires ten times his size. So, when Esquire asked Bernthal about the scene in our latest digital cover story, he admitted that he couldn’t believe Disney allowed it either.

“Listen man, I couldn’t believe the dog gets killed,” Bernthal said, even though he co-wrote the Punisher special. “[That] they let me do it? It’s crazy. Crazy.”

Still, if anyone knows what Punisher fans are after, it’s Bernthal. According to the actor, it felt like Marvel didn’t exactly know what to do with the character until he stepped in. “Every iteration over the last few years, they were like, ‘What if we found him and he’s now teaching English?’” Bernthal said. “These were literally things that they were pitching. ‘What if he’s a chess grand master now?’ I was like, ‘Look, dude, the one thing I’m not going to do with fans is take a giant jump.’”

Instead, Bernthal took the character down an even darker route by turning his penchant for violence into a character study about military PTSD and suicide. He wasn’t afraid that it might scare the suits over at Disney.

“I do think that this is the level of psychological complexity and just blunt violence that the fans really want for this character,” he said, even if The Punisher’s dog-murdering thug lives right next to search results for Puppy Dog Pals and Air Bud.