Jon Bernthal Talks with TV.com And Metro.co.uk

Jon Bernthal who plays Shane has talked to both TV.com and Metro.co.uk recently.  In the first interview with TV.com Bernthal talks about the show’s popularity and if he was shocked by its success, he also talked about Season 2 scripts and when they are going to start shooting along with some other great questions:

There’s been a big overhaul in the writing team since season one. Has that had much of an effect on the shows production and the atmosphere between you all?
No, not really. I think everybody who works on this show is incredibly talented and incredibly driven. The writers were really kept separate from us last year; we were in Atlanta and they were here [in LA].

This is really Frank’s project, I think there are a lot of unbelievable collaborators that work on this but at the end of the day Frank oversaw and continues to oversee every single word that is uttered on screen. And, you know, we were really not privy to any of those decisions. I don’t even know what the truth is. I would be really out of turn to speak on it.

One thing everybody should know is that, as genius a writer and director Frank is, and as great as an artist he is, he’s equally that great as a human being. He’s as kind and as humane a person as I’ve ever met. And I know that if any decisions were made, they were made with utter graciousness. Some of the stuff that came out in the press, that people were fired and this and that, I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe that that’s how this went down.

There are new writers, I have met some of them and they’re all great. They’re super jazzed to get going. And I think that’s really exciting stuff.

The first season didn’t stick that closely to the comic books. How true is that for the second season?
I think it’s going to be more of the same. We’ll get back to it and then we’re going to steer off of it. The comic is going to be this line that we follow; we’re always going to come back to the road but we’re going to take detours on the way.

Having the comic’s creator Robert Kirkman on board must really help.
It’s a real mark of the kind of artist that Robert Kirkman is. He’s one of the executive producers on the show; he’s one of the writers. I think a lot of people out there would say, “Hey, look. I have one of the best-selling comic books in the world. Why are you steering off of it?” But instead, Kirkman has used this as a chance to revisit things, to look at things differently and to change things.

I love it when they show those iconic shots from the comic book and we’ll ride on it. And then I love that there are places, characters and settings that didn’t even exist in the comic and are part of our show. Besides, having Robert Kirkman involved in the show gives this street cred with the comic book contingent.

And in the second interview it’s mostly about Jon Bernthal’s acting career but the interviewer does manage to get in some Walking Dead questions:

Your character in The Walking Dead canoodles with his best friend’s wife – that’s a bit bad, isn’t it?

He definitely does some canoodling but anything can happen in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. I’d like to look at it as non-malicious canoodling.

You play Shane, who was  killed off early on in the original comic book. Do you have better job security?

I’m not sure if any of us do. Robert Kirkman, who wrote the comic, is great. We’ve gone off on tangents from the original comic and one is that Shane’s still alive. We don’t have to follow everything that’s happened in the comic but this is the kind of show where people get picked off all the time. It adds to the atmosphere on set – we never know if each script is going to be  our last.

What did you think of Andrew Lincoln’s American accent?

Before we started filming, we went to a restaurant in Atlanta where the woman who owns it gives customers a back rub. There’s nothing weird about it, it’s just what she does. She did it to Andrew and asked where he came from. He said England but he spoke in the accent he uses on the show the whole time and she said: ‘You sure don’t sound like you’re from England.’ So if he can pull it off with that lady, I think he convinced the rest of the country. I’m from DC and if you drive five miles you’re in the South, where people use that accent, so it wasn’t so much of a struggle for me.

To read the entire TV.com interview click here!

To read the Metro.co.uk interview click here!

-Dane

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