“Tom Jane was always very much on my radar,” Hensleigh comments. “I wanted an actor who was willing to be somewhat spartan in his performance, and I was incredibly impressed with Tom’s performance in 61*. I thought he had an everyman quality. He had good looks, but not the sort of GQ-model look; he had a more rugged, experienced look. He struck me as what I refer to as a ‘pure’ actor – the performance naturally flows from him. He doesn’t have to exert a great deal. While being very still before the camera, he can convey a great deal of emotion.”
As it happened, Jane has been an avid comic book reader since childhood. He had read the Punisher as a youth and greatly admired the recent comics by Ennis and Dillon. “To get the chance to bring Frank Castle onto the big screen was incredibly exciting,” the actor says. “Here is this unique character that has this specialized set of skills and he lives his life totally beholden to a set of ideals. Frank dedicated his life to upholding a system of justice that he believed in. And everything that he lived his life supporting and idealizing crumbles as fate completely lets him down. Frank is filled with rage and incomprehensible pain. There's absolutely nothing in his life that's been unsullied by this experience.”
Hensleigh recalls that he and Jane shared the same vision for the character from their first meeting. “Tom and I decided to play a great deal of the character’s emotion silently, or with very little dialogue. Most of the pictures that we loved from our youth were anti-hero pictures with stars like Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. They’re not verbal roles. Those stars consistently played men who were so broken-down that they were unable to articulate what was really going on with them emotionally.”
All agreed that Jane had the ability to forge the necessary emotional connection with the audience. As Ari Arad puts it, “Tom is a remarkable actor. There’s something very soulful about him. You feel Castle’s pain, and you understand what he’s going through.”
With Jane poised to become a formidable Punisher, an equally formidable actor was needed for the role of Howard Saint. The filmmakers approached superstar John Travolta and were thrilled when he responded positively. Says Hurd, “With just a look, a glance, two or three words, John Travolta can deliver the power of his character’s position. I think that John Travolta and Tom Jane are the perfect hero and villain combination.”
Travolta describes the film as a departure from the comic book norm. “It offered a very different type of Marvel hero who’s not superhuman. It was very strongly based in reality, rather than fantasy or science fiction, and I found that refreshing,” Travolta comments.
An exceptional roster of actors and actresses were cast in supporting roles.
Samantha Mathis (Little Women) portrays Castle’s down-to-earth wife, Maria. Oscar-nominated actor Roy Scheider, who starred in such classic 70s films as The French Connection, Klute and Marathon Man, was approached to play Castle’s father, Frank Sr. Scheider was impressed by the story’s realistic tone. “To me, the action was very believable,” he says. “It wasn’t a film about CGI special effects. Jonathan was clearly writing a story about a human being.”
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