Rise to Fame
Shane Walsh was scheduled to die at the end of season one. Robert Kirkman's comics kill him off in the first act, but Frank Darabont kept extending his storyline because Bernthal made the character too compelling to write out. Getting killed in season two ended up mattering less than the two seasons that changed his career completely. He came into it with 30-plus stage productions, he has said, Harvard-affiliated theater training, and a string of forgettable TV guest spots that suggested a solid character actor ceiling, not a franchise lead.
In the Spotlight
The Punisher ran two seasons on Netflix before Marvel canceled it in 2019, which usually kills a character's momentum. He waited six years, and Frank Castle came back in Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+ in 2025. In between, he won an Emmy for a single guest appearance on The Bear. His 2026 slate is unusual for this stage of a career: a Christopher Nolan epic (The Odyssey), a Broadway debut in Dog Day Afternoon, and a Punisher special he's co-writing. His & Hers went to Netflix's worldwide number one. Cancellation turned out to be the slow play.
Side Notes
In 2009, he knocked a man unconscious on Venice Beach after someone tried to steal his dog. The victim didn't immediately recover. He settled a $2M civil lawsuit, served 3 years probation, and has described it as the moment that forced him to change. His brother Thomas is married to Sheryl Sandberg. He says he was arrested at 17 and broke his nose 14 times in fights, and he played professional baseball in Europe while studying theater in Moscow. The rescue animal advocacy and woodworking hobby look like deliberate distance from all of that.