Moment Jon Bernthal had 'gun put to his head' while living in Moscow
Jon Bernthal opened up about a chilling encounter that he had while he was studying in Moscow, including a gun being put to his head.
The Punisher star moved to Moscow in the late 1990s where he enrolled at the Moscow Art Theatre School. This period in the late 90s was marked in Russia by a seismic political shift after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This included reforms introducing capitalism, restructuring the state and the government and also saw a significant rise in organised crime, as Bernthal would discover in the terrifying incident.
Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Bernthal recalled how on his third day in Moscow he ended up on the business end of a gun while going home, on his birthday.
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The actor had missed his first day at the school because he had forgotten his immigration papers, and got lost when he went home to retrieve them as he couldn't read the signs in Cyrillic, delaying him further.
By the time he was going home at the end of the day, he was walking back by himself, saying that it was 'pitch black', when he witnessed something horrifying.
"I'm walking down the street and this Mercedes pulls up in front of me," he said. "And these two guys get out of the front seat, and they reach into the back seat, and they grab something out, and I see it's this woman.
"She's in like a beautiful cocktail dress, and they're pulling her out of the backseat of this Mercedes, and I'm the only one on the street and they clearly don't see me, but this woman sees me, she makes direct eye contact with me."
He told how they had taken the woman to a building where they started brutally beating her, saying that they were 'just opening her head up' against the side of a building.
Bernthal said that he had acted instinctively and run at the men, grabbing one of them and demanding to know what they were doing in English.
But the men had absolutely no time for his interference.
"He pulled out a gun and put in right to my forehead, and he said in English 'go away'," said Bernthal. "And I knew in an instant it was like I was a bug.
"I'd seen guns before I'd seen stuff before, I just knew that this was a completely different level."
He might play the ruthless Punisher on screen, but this was real life, not the movies.
"And so I walked away, listening to that, listening to what they're doing," said Bernthal.
While this may have been the scariest moment on his birthday, Bernthal recalled that this wasn't even the only time he had a gun pointed at him on that day.
Earlier on while making his way back to school after retrieving his documents, he had to cross an enormous road of 'about 16 lanes'.
"I just start like Frogger I'm like dodging cars," he said. "Soon as I get to the other side, boom, AK-47s in my face, Russian police are right there."
He explained that they had written him up for crossing the street, as there was an underpass, saying: "You're supposed to cross below, I didn't know that.
"They're yelling at me in Russian, I give them 20 rubles, they let me go."
That's certainly a memorable birthday!
Topics: Jon Bernthal, Joe Rogan, Russia, News
Kit Roberts