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‘I’m a big believer in pain being an adhesive’: Jon Bernthal on ‘walking through fire’ for Ava DuVernay

The actor’s new film Origin sees him star as the husband of Pulitzer-winner Isabel Wilkerson. He reflects on the fight for social justice and avoiding the new film seeming like a ‘woke agenda’

It’s a biopic of the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson, but it’s also an adumbration of her 2020 book, Caste: the Origin of Our Discontents, which was considered the most important intervention in the issues vexing the US for years, and was lauded by Barack Obama. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Courtesy NeonIn it, Wilkerson argues that racism in the US is actually a caste system, characterised by the same social structures of hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion and purity that defined Nazi Germany, and that continues to shape Indian society. The experimental thing about the film is that it only intermittently tries to draw these ideas back into human stories, so a lot of the action is in the form of conversations between academics, or lectures, or lightbulb moments in the protagonist’s head.

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