In our own conversation, Renner remarked more than once that going straight from “Hawkeye” (which filmed in New York and Atlanta) to “Mayor of Kingstown” (which was shot in Toronto and in Kingston, Ontario) had been grueling, and that he might not have taken on the workload if he hadn’t been able to bring his 8-year-old daughter, Ava, to these locations. But that’s just an ego thing - those are only words.”Īnd then in short order he fulfilled all those goals, delivering memorable performances in movies like “28 Weeks Later” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” “Maybe 10, 15 years ago, I was like, it’d be cool to be a cowboy in a Western,” he said. He was just as frenetic in his earliest days as a theater actor, as he pivoted from playing the Scarecrow in a Modesto Junior College production of “The Wizard of Oz” to parts in Lyle Kessler’s brutal thriller “Orphans” and as a suicidal teenager in a stage version of “Ordinary People.”Įven as Renner began to break through in film and television, he was reluctant to contemplate what his dream roles were - if he had any at all. But I just don’t have the time or capacity to do it.” “I’m still proud of the idea to give more time to superfans, the will behind it. “It just became more complicated than it needed to be for my life,” Renner explained.
He did, however, have to pull the plug on another side project, the Jeremy Renner Official mobile app, an online platform that shared news, photos and other content about him but became a target for internet trolls. I was always on set or in character or in costume on one of the shows.” He had wrapped shooting on “Mayor of Kingstown” a few weeks earlier - an assignment he’d gone on to immediately after finishing “Hawkeye” - and was still feeling the impact of those consecutive projects. In late October, Renner was speaking in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles as he sipped from a mug bearing the letters TCB, as in the Elvis Presley motto Taking Care of Business. “Some people go a little deeper - ‘H e was also Jeffrey Dahmer, he was nominated for this, he’s actually a proper actor.’” “Some people just know me as Hawkeye,” Renner said. Now a combination of eclectic choices and unexpected circumstances have led the 50-year-old Renner to this pair of prominent streaming projects - an outcome that he finds satisfying, even if he’s not sure what it says about him or the vagaries of sustaining a lengthy Hollywood career. He has been moving on these parallel tracks for many years, well before he fired his first arrow in a Marvel movie. That he can star in both shows - that creators and audiences accept him in projects that are popular and that are personal, playing men of decisive deeds and men with internalized conflicts - is a source of both puzzlement and delight to him. But comparatively, ‘Mayor of Kingstown’ is going to hit people with a hammer.” “There’s some heaviness to it, don’t get me wrong.