After years of treating its Disney+ shows like stretched-out movies and assuming problems could be fixed in post, Marvel’s TV operation hit a wall in 2023. After some big failures that resulted in critically derided shows (“Secret Invasion” for one), the company finally shifted to a more traditional television model, complete with proper showrunners. No project exposed the failure of the old approach more than “Daredevil: Born Again,” which ran into similar issues and then scrapped its head writers and remaining directors, shutting down to overhaul and effectively starting over after six episodes had already been shot. One of the clearest warning signs came from Jon Bernthal.
The actor had been announced to return as Frank Castle but rejected Marvel’s original material, later saying its plans “didn’t really make sense,” were not congruent with the character, and would not appeal to fans. “So we had to walk away,” he said. The overhaul brought Dario Scardapane—a writer and executive producer on Netflix’s “The Punisher”—aboard as showrunner, and Bernthal said the new team pulled him into the process to define Frank’s psychological and physical state.
Now, in a new THR interview, Bernthal detailed just how much authority came with his return, revealing that Marvel allowed him to personally rework and rewrite the Punisher material that ultimately aired in “Born Again” on Disney+ in 2025.
“I didn’t like what they had for Frank at all,” Bernthal said. “Ultimately, they gave me something that they let me rework and rewrite—and they aired that. It worked for them.”
That intervention led directly to “The Punisher: One Last Kill,” the standalone special Bernthal co-wrote with Reinaldo Marcus Green, who previously directed him in “King Richard” and HBO’s “We Own This City.” It also marked Bernthal’s first official screenwriting credit after a decade of playing Frank across “Daredevil,” “The Punisher,” and “Born Again.”
However, Bernthal’s creative fight over the character stretched well beyond the discarded first version of “Born Again.” He also admitted for the first time that “One Last Kill” was the culmination of “five years of negotiating and navigating, of not doing a lighter version that maybe they wanted.”
“I insisted that I had to be the creative force behind it,” Bernthal said.
After co-writing “One Last Kill,” Bernthal teamed with Ebon Moss-Bachrach to write “The Bear” prequel episode “Gary,” helping establish him as a writer and creator beyond his work in front of the camera.
The Frank Castle Bernthal fought hard to preserve appears next in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” where the hardened vigilante becomes an unlikely mentor to Tom Holland’s increasingly isolated Peter Parker. Bernthal said, Frank recognizes his own self-destructive behavior in Peter and tries to steer him away from embracing the same darkness.
“Frank is purpose-driven, mission-driven, ‘Leave me the fuck alone’—and I love when there are little cracks in that,” Bernthal said. “He’s like, ‘Why are you being a dick to her? Don’t do that—that’s what I do.’ To see himself in this and then be a little bit protective like, ‘You’re trying to do the whole dark thing, don’t do that shit, I do that shit, it’s not fun, do your shit’—I love that, and I really buy that.”
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” opens July 31.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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